New model harnesses the power of supercomputers for more accurate flood simulation
Researchers at ORNL used TRITON to simulate flooding in Houston, Texas, and surrounding areas caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Light purples represent shallower water, and dark purples represent deeper water. Credit: Sudershan Gangrade/ORNL A team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Tennessee Technological University has created a 2D open-source flood inundation model designed for multi-architecture computing systems. The Two-dimensional Runoff Inundation Toolkit for Operational Needs, or TRITON, can use multiple graphics processing units, or GPUs, to model floods more quickly and accurately than existing tools. Flood modeling is an important part of emergency preparedness and response. However, models must be fast and accurate—returning simulation results in minutes—to be a useful tool for decision making and planning. The higher the resolution of the model, the more computing power is