Structured Parallel Programming

Chapter 10

Forward Seismic Simulation

Reflection seismology is the imaging of the Earth’s subsurface structure using sound waves. It is widely used in the oil and gas industry to determine where to find hydrocarbons and most efficiently extract them. Reverse time migration (RTM) is one approach to imaging that yields high quality images but requires much computation, and hence is desirable to parallelize.

The example here is not the entire RTM algorithm, but the key part that dominates the computational burden. The obvious parallelization with the stencil pattern (Section 4.6.1) suffers from low arithmetic intensity, even when using tiling for cache (Section 7.3). However, the arithmetic intensity can be raised much further by recognizing that ...