Parallelization for geophysical waveform analysis

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Date

2013-02-22

Journal Title

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Texas A&M University

Abstract

The use of parallel processors can be a very effective method for improving the running time of large or complex calculations. The Standard Template Adaptive Parallel Library (STAPL) is being developed by Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger at Texas A&M University to aid the parallel programmer by providing standard implementations of common parallel programming tasks. Our research involves using STAPL to apply parallel methods to a problem that has already been solved sequentially: Seismic ray tracing. In short, we are modelling the paths of seismic waves as they travel through a known earth model (i.e., an earth region whose properties we know how to model mathematically). By studying the solution to this problem, it is hoped that a more difficult problem may one day be solved: Given the source and end locations of seismic waves, their travel times from source to end location, and their initial and final amplitudes, determine the properties of the earth region through which they traveled. Parallel methods apply well to this problem and are important because, for complex earth models, the computation size can grow very large. Our early results have shown that a parallel version of the ray tracing code running on 8 processors ran 5 times as fast as the original sequential version. We hope to generalize the program as much as possible to run optimally on multiple platforms and hardware configurations. To assist in the design and understanding of the algorithms, we are also developing a visualization tool.

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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 19-20).

Keywords

computer science., Major computer science.

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