An Approach to Optimise the Execution of RTM Algorithm in Multicore Machines

The new oil fields discovered in the Gulf of Mexico and in Brazil´s southeast coast are located in deep water, which imposes new challenges for sub salt seismic imaging. To produce sufficient accurate imaging of such fields, the compute intensive RTM method is the currently favoured approach, despite its high computational cost. This work evaluates the RTM code in multicore machines and proposes a new version that is more than 2.4 faster than the original. Besides, how the memory hierarchy is utilised has a crucial impact on the performance of the code. This article also presents an innovative approach to calculate efficient block values for a better memory utilisation on multicore archictetures.