Simulating Real-World Floods on GPUs

Flood risk assessment is important in minimizing damages and economic losses caused by flood events.
A team of researchers from Vienna University of Technology and visual computing firm VRVis, are using GPUs to run fast simulations of large-scale scenarios, including river flooding, storm-water events and underground flows.
The researcher’s primary interest is in decision-making systems, where they evaluate many different scenarios and select the solution with the best outcome, which is usually very computationally expensive. Therefore, simulation runs need to be as fast as possible to reduce the overall time required to find the best solutions.