Predicting Tsunamis

Japan’s Fujitsu Laboratories has developed an AI model to predict tsunami flooding in coastal areas in real-time.

The AI model developed by Fujitsu Laboratories can predict flooding forecasts for specific areas, making it easier to evacuate people and offer insights on potential damage to surrounding infrastructure
The technology company used Fugaku, the world’s fastest supercomputer, to develop the model.
A team of researchers generated training data for 20,000 possible tsunami scenarios based on high-resolution tsunami simulations, using the supercomputer. They created the AI model using these data sets.
In the event of an earthquake, inputting tsunami waveform data observed offshore into the model helps predict flooding in coastal areas before the wave makes landfall.
This will make it possible to accurately and rapidly obtain flooding forecasts for specific areas and can also offer critical insights into the effects of localised waves on surrounding infrastructure like buildings and roads, according to the company.
The system is also said to make evacuation measures more efficient.
The model can also be run in seconds on ordinary PCs, making it easier to build practical, real-time systems, which previously required supercomputers.

A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance compared to a general-purpose computer. Performance of a supercomputer is measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS).
Supercomputers contain tens of thousands of processors and can perform billions and trillions of calculations or computations per second. A teraflop is a measure of a computer’s speed equivalent to a trillion floating point operations per second. It is a measure of the processing speed of a computer.

For more details on uses of supercomputers and India’s National Supercomputing Mission, visit:

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