On the parallelization of the acoustic wave equation with absorbing boundary conditions

Many practical problems involve wave propagation through atmosphere, oceans, or terrestrial crust. Modeling and analysis of these problems is usually done in (semi)infinite domains, but numerical calculations obviously impose restriction to finite domains. To mimic the actual behavior in the (semi)infinite medium, artificial absorbing boundary conditions are imposed at the boundaries, whereby waves can only exit, but not enter the finite computational domain. Efficient absorbing boundary conditions are difficult to analyze and costly to run. In particular, it is of interest to assess whether the wave equation with (approximate or exact) absorbing boundary conditions admits a suitable diagonalization. This would open the possibility for parallelizing many important numerical codes used in applications. In this paper the authors propose a set of stable, local, absorbing boundary conditions for the discrete acoustic wave equation. They show that the acoustic wave equation with absorbing boundary conditions cannot be exactly diagonalized