Comparison of the Parallel Fast Marching Method, the Fast Iterative Method, and the Parallel Semi-Ordered Fast Iterative Method

Solving the eikonal equation allows to compute a monotone front propagation of anisotropic nature and is thus a widely applied technique in different areas of science and engineering. Various methods are available out of which only a subset is suitable for shared-memory parallelization, which is the key focus of this analysis. We evaluate three different approaches, those being the recently developed parallel fast marching method based on domain decompositioning, the inherently parallel fast iterative method, and a parallel approach of the semi-ordered fast iterative method, which offers increased stability for variations in the front velocity as compared to established iterative methods. We introduce the individual algorithms, evaluate the accuracy, and show benchmark results based on a dual socket Intel Ivy Bridge-EP cluster node using C++/OpenMP implementations. Our investigations show that the parallel fast marching method performs best in terms of accuracy and single thread performance and reasonably well with respect to parallel efficiency for up to 8-16 threads.