This article is a review of the work that we are carrying out to efficiently simulate shallow water flows. In this paper, we focus on the efficient implementation of path-conservative Roe type high-order finite volume schemes to simulate shallow flows that are supposed to be governed by the one-layer or two-layer shallow water systems, formulated under the form of a conservation law with source terms. The implementation of the scheme is carried out on Graphics Processing Units (CPUs), thus achieving a substantial improvement of the speedup with respect to normal CPUs. Finally, some numerical experiments are presented. (C) 2010 Academic des sciences. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.