Large scale calculations of 3D elastic wave propagation in a complex geology

The authors present a large-scale finite element simulation of fully elastic seismic waves propagating in a complex 3-D geological environment. The results are noteworthy on three accounts: (1) the complexity of the synthetic model which involves a folded structure and variable velocity of propagation; (2) the size and detail of the computational mesh, with over 13 million elements and 1700 time steps; and (3) a high computational efficiency and speed of execution. A finite-element explicit-in-time procedure was used to solve the 3-D elastic wave equations. The wave train was generated by a 3-Hz surface pressure source over a simulated time interval of 10 s. The simulation itself took 4.5 h to complete on a Fujitsu VP2400 supercomputer, at a sustained rate of about 0.5 GFLOPS