Development of GPU-accelerated kinematic wave model using CUDA fortran

We proposed a GPU (Grapic Processing Unit) accelerated kinematic wave model for rainfall runoff simulation and tested the accuracy and speed up performance of the proposed model. The governing equations are the kinematic wave equation for surface flow and the Green-Ampt model for infiltration. The kinematic wave equations were discretized using a finite volume method and CUDA fortran was used to implement the rainfall runoff model. Several numerical tests were conducted. The computed results of the GPU accelerated kinematic wave model were compared with several measured and other numerical results and reasonable agreements were observed from the comparisons. The speed up performance of the GPU accelerated model increased as the number of grids increased, achieving a maximum speed up of approximately 450 times compared to a CPU (Central Processing Unit) version, at least for the tested computing resources.