Parallel 3-D pseudospectral simulation of seismic wave propagation

Abstract

Three‐dimensional pseudospectral modeling for a realistic scale problem is still computationally very intensive, even when using current powerful computers. To overcome this, we have developed a parallel pseudospectral code for calculating the 3-D wavefield by concurrent use of a number of processors. The parallel algorithm is based on a partition of the computational domain, where the field quantities are distributed over a number of processors and the calculation is concurrently done in each subdomain with interprocessor communications. Experimental performance tests using three different styles of parallel computers achieved a fairly good speed up compared with conventional computation on a single processor: maximum speed‐up rate of 26 using 32 processors of a Thinking Machine CM-5 parallel computer, 1.6 using a Digital Equipment DEC‐Alpha two‐CPU workstation, and 4.6 using a cluster of eight Sun Microsystems SPARC-Station 10 (SPARC-10) workstations connected by an Ethernet. The result of this test agrees well with the performance theoretically predicted for each system. To demonstrate the feasibility of our parallel algorithm, we show three examples: 3-D acoustic and elastic modeling of fault‐zone trapped waves and the calculation of elastic wave propagation in a 3-D syncline model.