Introduction

What is the tsunami lab?

The tsunami lab is a course taught at the University of Jena as the practical lab for the lecture on parallel computing. The goal is to write a C++ tsunami wave equation solver, optimize and parallelize it and run tsunami simulations on an HPC cluster.

During the class, we received weekly assignments which make up the final grade. Our (Luca-Philipp Grumbach and Richard Hofmann) implementations of the given weekly tasks are what make up this repository - a fully functional 2D wave equation solver for Linux and MacOS.

../../_images/tohoku_example.png

Visualization of an OpenMP-parallelized tsunami simulation of the March 11, 2011 M 9.1 Tohoku event.

What does the code do?

The solver can be used either with pre-defined setups or with custom bathymetry & displacement files. A bathymetry file contains info on the depth of water, while the displacement file describes the effects on the water level due to e.g. an earthquake.

Using this data, our program will numerically calculate (if specified in parallel on multiple CPU cores) the wave propagation after the initial input data, that is specifically calculate and output how a tsunami forms and moves after an earthquake.

The solver outputs a solution file, either in form of a csv or netcdf (recommended for large data). This data can then be visualized, for example using Paraview:

As depicted in the video, you can also load up the utilized bathymetry file to enhance the visual appeal of the representations. The Warp by Scale filter lets you turn any 2D plane into 3D. The coloring is done using a color map, which you can find online.

As for the scale (-1m to 1m) that we chose to color the waves with, you are free to choose any values you wish. It all depends on the color scale you use and the maximum and minimum height of the tsunami wave.

Documentation structure

This documentation is divided into different categories categories:

  • First steps

    • Introduction - provides a broad overview

    • Setup - requirements and explanations on how to put this repository into action

    • Usage - information on how to excecute this project and its tests

  • Code documentation

    • Assignments - divided into the different weekly steps, this category provides a detailed and manually written documentation of the source code

    • Namespaces - automatically created code documentation using doxygen, divided into the namespaces