Tech Faculty And Students Work To Create Faster Flood Simulator

Tennessee Tech faculty and students are working on running models on flood simulators in a fraction of the time it used to.

Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate Professor Dr. Alfred Kalyanapu said that is made possible through the TRITON program, which is an advanced model from the one he created while working on his Ph.D. He said he realized that most of the computer software available to run floods and other models could take hours, even days to complete.

“Say if you are expecting a large flood whether it’s because of a large hurricane or a large weather system moving in and you want to see all the flood-prone areas because of that event you can do it in advance,” Kalyanapu said. “Within a few hours, you can predict or forecast where those issues can be.”

Kalyanapu said this is made possible by using graphics cards. He said graphics cards are added to computers in order to improve graphics and speed for things like video games, and that many smartphones also use them.

Kalyanapu said a graphics card is similar to using a supercomputer inside your computer itself. He said the speed of the model run time was up to 200 times faster.

“Our long-term goal is to have this model available in such a way where potentially communities or agencies who have the resources to run these computer models can run them so you can have advanced knowledge of floods that can happen or identify flood hot spots even at street level,” Kalyanapu said.

The program is open and free for public use at https://triton.ornl.gov. A user can input information that TRITON will then display possible flood outcomes, depending on an area’s topography and the amount of incoming water due to a rainfall-drive flood, flash flood, or a dam breakage.