UC Santa Cruz and NVIDIA Accelerate Coastal Flood Risk Simulation and Visualization
Executive Summary
Researchers at UC Santa Cruz's Center for Coastal Climate Resilience are leveraging NVIDIA RTX GPUs and CUDA-X software to significantly accelerate complex coastal flooding simulations. This technological collaboration has reduced computation time from six hours to approximately 40 minutes, enabling the team to create high-resolution, data-driven visualizations of flood scenarios. The project's goal is to demonstrate the protective value of nature-based solutions like coral reefs and dunes, thereby motivating government agencies, NGOs, and financial organizations to invest in climate adaptation and preservation efforts.
Key Takeaways
* Performance Acceleration: Simulation workloads that previously took around six hours on CPUs can now be completed in about 40 minutes using a single NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU, a speedup of roughly 9x.
* Technology Stack: The research utilizes NVIDIA RTX GPUs, NVIDIA CUDA-X software (including cuPyNumeric and nvfortran compiler), and Unreal Engine 5 for rendering and visualization.
* Primary Function: The project models coastal flooding scenarios to assess risks and quantify the economic benefits of adaptation strategies, such as restored dunes and coral reefs.
* Real-World Application: The visualizations have directly informed policy and investment, contributing to the creation of a parametric insurance policy to protect and restore the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef in Mexico.
* Future Goals: The team aims to map flood risks for all small-island developing states globally before the COP30 climate conference and is working to enhance the USGS's Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS) for California.
Strategic Importance
This collaboration showcases NVIDIA's hardware as an essential tool for high-impact scientific and climate research, expanding its market beyond commercial applications. For researchers, the accelerated computing power allows for a global scaling of their work, providing compelling visual evidence to drive urgent policy decisions and investment in climate resilience.