Parallel seismic propagation simulation in anisotropic media by irregular grids finite difference method on PC cluster

Abstract

A 3D Finite Difference Method (FDM) with spatially irregular grids is developed to simulate the seismic propagation in anisotropic media. Staggered irregular grid finite difference operator with second-order time and spatial accuracy are used to approximate the velocity-stress elastic wave equations. The parallel codes are implemented with Message Passing Interface (MPI) library and c language. The 3D model with complex earth structure geometry is split into more flexible subdomains by the proposed irregular method. The spurious diffractions from "staircase" interfaces can be easily eliminated without grid densification and costs less computing time. Parallel simulation scheme is described by pseudo codes. The spatial parallelism on PC cluster makes it a promising method for geo-science numerical computing. Parallel computation shows that the message passing between different CPUs are composed of the subdomain boundary information and need a considerable communication. The excellent parallelism speedup can be achieved through reasonable subdomain division and fast network connection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.