REVERSE-TIME MIGRATION IN PARALLEL - A TUTORIAL

A reverse-time migration is implemented on a fine grain or massively parallel computer. With fine-grain architectures many processors are distributed throughout the memory space and can operate on data in place. In addtion, via a general communication system, any processor can access data from anywhere in the entire memory-processor space. Thus, operations on both local and global data elements are possible. These capabilities are controlled by parallel language constructs which allow parallel variable declaration, parallel arithmetic operation, and parallel random memory access. Reverse-time migration was programmed on a fine-grain machine with these hardware and software features. The reverse-time migration process had a speed improvement of two orders of magnitude relative to a state-of-the-art serial machine.