Parallel and distributed seismic wave-field modeling

Elastic or acoustic wave-field modeling is an important part of seismic exploration. It can be used during the planning, processing and interpretation stages of seismic investigation. First attempts of using wave-field modeling were undertaken in the seventies by Alford, Kelly and others (Alford R M, Kelly K R and Boore D M 1974 Geophysics 39 (6) 834; Kelly K R, Ward R W, Treitel S and Alford R M 1976 Geophysics 41 2). These attempts were restricted by the limitations of computers at that time. Even now, computation for models of the standard exploration scale could last many hours, and many days in case of longer recording times. One of the best methods to overcome this disadvantage is parallelization of computations (Niccanna C and Bean C J 1997 Computers and Geosciences 23 (7) 771; Villareal A and Scales J A 1997 Computers in Physics 11 (4) 388). This paper presents the results of distributed parallelization of elastic and acoustic wave-field modeling based on a Parallel Virtual Machine