Improving Performance of 3D Seismic Survey Simulation with a Hybrid MPI/OpenMP Approach

Geophysical imaging faces nowadays new challenges related to 3D data acquisition, which means that we need to simulate full 3D volumes. In this work, we present a hybrid MPI/OpenMP approach for modeling the 3D heterogeneous acoustic wave equation to boost the performance of a classical extrapolation scheme. Our solution is a standard eighth order in space and second order in time 3D acoustic FD code, parallelized with MPI/OpenMP and running on Intel general-purpose CPUs. Test cases provided by the High-Performance Computing for Energy project (hpc4e.eu) are solved using our optimized numerical code. We experiment our solution using the flat acoustic tests at 20 Hz maximum frequency. These are codenamed AF-UNIT-20Hz and AF-SURVEY-20Hz. The first test is related to a single shot modeling and the second one simulates an acquisition considering 1681 shots in the subsurface. Results show that a hybrid MPI/OpenMP strategy used to solve the UNIT test in standard multi-core machines is easily scalable to more than one node for the SURVEY experiment. All experiments were run in Lobo Carneiro, a 6000 core machine installed at the High Performance Computing Center at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.