A numerical seismic 3-D migration model for vector multiprocessors

The availability of a multiprocessor vector machine, such as the CRAY X-MP, along with large, fast secondary memory such as the CRAY SSD, opens new frontiers to numerical algorithm design for 3-D simulations. The 3-D seismic migration, which is of crucial importance in exploration seismology, will be studied as a model problem. The numerical model discussed in this paper employs an alternating direction implicit (ADI) Crank-Nicolson scheme which takes full advantage of the parallel architecture of the underlying machine. It is demonstrated that careful algorithm design can lead to a significant speedup of the calculation when more than one processor is used. The throughput times obtained in this study are an order of magnitude faster than some conventional approaches.