Seismic Wave Propagation by Finite Differences on the Connection Machine

by Jacek Myczkowski, Thinking Machines Corp, Cambridge, United States,



Document Type: Proceeding Paper

Part of: Engineering Mechanics

Abstract:

Seismic modeling represents a difficult numerical challenge and consumes a significant amount of CPU time on the largest available supercomputers. With the advent of massively-parallel supercomputers, there is a possibility of drastically reducing the execution time for some of these codes. In this paper the acoustic wave equation with sponge boundary conditions will be used as an example to show how to map and optimize an explicit finite difference algorithm onto a massively parallel machine. This program achieved a sustained performance of 14.1 billion numerical operations per second (14.1 Gigaflops) including I/O on a 65536 processor CM-2 supercomputer. In recognition of this performance, this work was awarded the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize in the performance category and received an Honorable Mention in the 1990 competition.

Subject Headings: Seismic waves | Seismic tests | Equipment and machinery | Wave propagation | Wave equations | Numerical methods | Finite difference method

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