Modeling Seismic Wave Propagation Using Graphics Processor Units (GPU)

The main drawback of the seismic modeling in 2D viscoelastic media on a single PC is that simulations with large gridsizes require a tremendous amount of floating point calculations. To improve computation speedup, a graphic processing units (GPUs) accelerated method was proposed using the staggered-grid finite difference (FD) method. The geophysical model is decomposed into subdomains for PML absorbing conditions. The vertex and fragment processing are fully used to solve FD schemes in parallel and the latest updated frames are swapped in Framebuffer Object (FBO) attachments as inputs for the next simulation step. The simulation program running on modern PCs provides significant speedup over a CPU implementation, which makes it possible to simulate realtime complex seismic propagation in high resolution of 2048*2048 gridsizes on low-cost PCs.