We discuss the development, verification, and performance of a GPU
accelerated discontinuous Galerkin method for the solutions of two dimensional
nonlinear shallow water equations. The shallow water equations are hyperbolic
partial differential equations and are widely used in the simulation of tsunami
wave propagations. Our algorithms are tailored to take advantage of the single
instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture of graphic processing units. The
time integration is accelerated by local time stepping based on a multi-rate
Adams-Bashforth scheme. A total variational bounded limiter is adopted for
nonlinear stability of the numerical scheme. This limiter is coupled with a
mass and momentum conserving positivity preserving limiter for the special
treatment of a dry or partially wet element in the triangulation. Accuracy,
robustness and performance are demonstrated with the aid of test cases. We
compare the performance of the kernels expressed in a portable threading
language OCCA, when cross compiled with OpenCL, CUDA, and OpenMP at runtime.Comment: 26 pages, 51 figure