Large-scale Massively Parallel Finite-difference Time-domain Modelling for Realistic Simulations of 3D Seismic Surveys

With rapid advances in parallel computing facilities, modelling of field-scale 3D seismic surveys is coming within reach. To this end, we have extended and optimized a finite-difference (FD) time-domain modelling code. The code combines state-of-the-art algorithms for the (visco ) acoustic, (visco ) elastic and anisotropic FD modelling kernels with high-order optimized FD operators for controlling numerical dispersion, and various source models. We have included perfectly-matched layer absorbing boundaries, explicit free surfaces, intrinsic attenuation, and precomputation for limiting the modelling aperture at the initial time steps. Parallelization has been extended to allow for both domain decomposition and simultaneous simulation of numerous shots. Our performance evaluation has shown that this code enables modelling 3D surveys within days on an industrial-size cluster. We present the improvements this code offers and demonstrate its performance for realistic modelling cases.