Seismic imaging using GPGPU accelerated reverse time migration

Seismic imaging using GPGPU accelerated reverse time migration

Nader Moussa

Abstract:

In this report, I outline the implementation and preliminary benchmarking of a parallelized program to perform reverse time migration (RTM) seismic imaging using the Nvidia CUDA platform for scientific computing, accelerated by a general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU). This novel software architecture allows access to the massively parallel computational capabilities of a high performance GPU system, which is used instead of a conventional computer architecture because of its high throughput of numeric capabilities.

The key aspects of this research concern the hardware setup for an optimized GPGPU computer system, and investigations into coarse-grained, algorithm-level parallelism. I also perform some analysis at the level of the numerical solver for the Finite-Difference Time Domain (FDTD) wave propagation kernel. This paper demonstrates that the GPGPU platform is very effective at accelerating RTM, and this will lead to more advanced processing for better imaging results.

Seismic imaging using GPGPU accelerated reverse time migration