Performance and scalability of finite-difference and finite-element wave-propagation modeling on Intel’s Xeon Phi

With the rapid developments in parallel compute architectures, algorithms for seismic modeling and imaging need to be re-considered in terms of parallelization. The aim of this paper is to compare scalability of seismic modeling algorithms: fi-nite differences, continuous mass-lumped finite elements and discontinuous Galerkin finite elements. The performance for these methods is considered for a given accuracy. The exper-iments were performed on an Intel Sandy Bridge dual 8-core machine and on Intel’s 61-core Xeon Phi, which is based on the Many Integrated Core architecture. The codes ran without any modifications. On the Sandy Bridge, the scalability is sim-ilar for all methods. On the Xeon Phi, the finite elements out-perform finite differences on larger number of cores in terms of scalability