Tsunami-HySEA: A GPU based model for the Italian candidate Tsunami Service Provider

Tsunami Service Providers (TSP), providing tsunami warnings in the framework of the systems coordinated by IOC/UNESCO worldwide, and other national tsunami warning centers, are striving to complement, or replace, decision matrices and pre-calculated tsunami scenario databases with FTRT (Faster Than Real Time) tsunami simulations. The aim is to increase the accuracy of tsunami forecast by assimilating the largest possible amount of data in quasi real time, and performing simulations in a few minutes wall-clock time, possibly including the coastal inundation stage. This strategy of direct real time computation, that could seem unfeasible a decade ago, it is now foreseeable thanks to the astonishingly recent increase in the computational power and bandwidth evolution of modern GPUs.