3-D large-scale wave propagation modeling by spectral element method on Cray T3E multiprocessor Original Research Article

Highly efficient algorithms and massively parallel computers are needed for acoustic full wave modeling in large scale 3-D realistic unbounded media. In this work a spectral element method in conjunction with a new iterative solution technique is presented. The very high spatial accuracy of the algorithm allows for increased computational efficiency when compared to standard finite element method. In addition, the use of an iterative solver, based on a local element-by-element formulation and a matrix-vector product which is factored and converted to a faster matrix-matrix product, allows for a significant reduction both in storage requirements and in the computational complexity. The resulting algorithm can easily be implemented on high-performance vector and/or parallel processors. The numerical scheme has been tested on a Cray T3E supercomputer. Our experimental results show that efficiency is very high and that good load balancing can be obtained at run time, because relevant blocks of computations are performed at the element level and are totally independent.