For the seismic event offshore Japan, tsunami arrives at coast (closest to the tsunami source) I approximately 20 min. Therefore, prediction of the wave parameters should be completed within several minutes. Modern simulation tools describe wave generation, propagation over the water area, and evaluation of inundation zone. However, all of these tools require extended computational resources and, as a rule, valuable time. The authors have proposed and implemented field programmable gates array (FPGA)-based hardware acceleration to calculate numerically propagation of the tsunami wave using personal computer. The developed parallel version of the MacCormack algorithm to solve numerically the shallow water system has been optimized for the FPGA architecture. In the FPGA-based calculator, highly efficient calculation pipeline has been arranged. Precision of the proposed parallel version of the MacCormack scheme was established, namely the numerically obtained solution has been compared to the known analytic one. FPGA-based calculator shows the same precision as the reference code and better tracing of the wave front. Numerical simulation in 3000 × 2000 nodes computational domain of 1 h tsunami wave propagation, caused by a model source, takes less than 1 min of processing time. So, the computation process takes 250–300 times less compared to sequential code execution at the same personal computer. This may be used to save time for decision-making in case of a near field event.