Fast seismic modeling and reverse time migration on a graphics processing unit cluster
Résumé
We designed a fast parallel simulator that solves the acoustic wave equation on a graphics processing unit (GPU) cluster. Solving the acoustic wave equation in an oil exploration industrial context aims at speeding up seismic modeling and reverse time migration (RTM). We considered a finite difference approach on a regular mesh, in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional cases. The acoustic wave equation is solved in a constant density or a variable density domain. All the computations were carried out in single precision (both in the CPU reference implementation and in the GPU implementation), because double precision was not required in our context. We used Compute Unified Device Architecture to take advantage of the GPU computational power. We studied different implementations and their impact on the application performance. The described application handles all the steps of seismic modeling and RTM and is used to solve real-world problems in an industrial production context. We obtained a speedup of 16 for RTM and up to 43 for the modeling application over a sequential code running on general-purpose CPUs. A CPU rack versus a GPU rack comparison was described and showed a 4.3 speedup.