Efficient Lava Flows Simulations with OpenCL: A Preliminary Application for Civil Defence Purposes

GPGPU (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units) has marked a revolution in the field of Parallel Computing allowing to achieve computational performance unimaginable until a few years ago. This hardware has proven to be extremely reliable and suitable to simulate Cellular Automata (CA) models for modeling complex systems whose evolution can be described in terms of local interactions. Starting from previous GPGPU implementations of CA models with CUDA, this paper presents an effective implementation of a well-known numerical model for simulating lava flows on Graphical Processing Units (GPU) based on the OpenCL (Open Computing Language) standard. In addition, a preliminary Civil Defence application related Hazard maps of an area located at Mt. Etna volcano (South Italy), confirms the validity of OpenCL and both low-cost and high-end graphics hardware as an alternative to expensive solutions for the simulation of CA models.