Computational Trade-Offs of Higher Order in Time RTM

This paper examines the computational trade-offs of higher order in time for Reverse Time Migration (RTM). It compares the hardware trade-offs for running RTM with 2nd order accurate temporal derivatives and 4th order accurate temporal derivatives. The exact difference in computational complexity depends on the RTM implementation. The timestep using 4th order accuracy can be much longer for the same level of accuracy theoretically leading to an overall savings in computational resources. This analysis is true for the main propagation, however practical RTM is often limited by hard disk speed, available random access memory (RAM), or data transfers between compute nodes in a distributed system. This paper discusses these additional elements and how they impact performance.