Iterative Krylov solution methods for geophysical electromagnetic simulations on throughput-oriented processing units

Abstract

Many geo-scientific applications involve boundary value problems arising in simulating electrostatic and electromagnetic fields for geophysical prospecting and subsurface imaging of electrical resistivity. Modeling complex geological media with three-dimensional finite-difference grids gives rise to large sparse linear systems of equations. For such systems, we have implemented three common iterative Krylov solution methods on graphics processing units and compared their performance with parallel host-based versions. The benchmarks show that the device efficiency improves with increasing grid sizes. Limitations are currently given by the device memory resources.