Computers & Geosciences 28 (2002) 887–899 Parallel 3-D viscoelastic finite difference seismic modelling$

Computational power has advanced to a state where we can begin to perform wavefield simulations for realistic (complex) 3-D earth models at frequencies of interest to both seismologists and engineers. On serial platforms, however, 3-D calculations are still limited to small grid sizes and short seismic wave traveltimes. To make use of the efficiency of network computers a parallel 3-D viscoelastic finite difference (FD) code is implemented which allows to distribute the work on several PCs or workstations connected via standard ethernet in an in-house network. By using the portable message passing interface standard (MPI) for the communication between processors, running times can be reduced and grid sizes can be increased significantly. Furthermore, the code shows good performance on massive parallel supercomputers which makes the computation of very large grids feasible. This implementation greatly expands the applicability of the 3-D elastic/viscoelastic finite-difference modelling technique by providing an efficient, portable an