DISTRIBUTED 3-DIMENSIONAL FINITE-DIFFERENCE MODELING OF WAVE-PROPAGATION IN ACOUSTIC MEDIA

Finite-difference modeling of wave propagation in heterogeneous media is a useful technique in a number of disciplines, including earthquake and oil exploration seismology, laboratory ultrasonics, ocean acousti cs, radar imaging, nondestructive evaluation, and others. However, the size of the models that can be treated by finite-difference methods i n three spatial dimensions has limited their application to supercompu ters. We describe a finite-difference domain-decomposition method for the three-dimensional acoustic wave equation which is well suited to d istributed parallelization. We have implemented this algorithm using t he PVM message-passing library, and show here benchmarks on two differ ent distributed memory architectures, the IBM SP2 and a network of low -cost PCs running the Linux operating system. We present performance m easurements of this algorithm on both the low-bandwidth PC network (10 -Mbits/s Ethernet) and the high-bandwidth SP2 cluster (40-Mbits/s swit ch). These results demonstrate the feasibility of doing distributed fi nite-difference acoustic modeling on networks of workstations, but poi nt to the substantial efficiencies that can be expected as higher band width networks became available. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physic s.