Seismic 3D prestack time migration on parallel computers

Parallel versions of prestack Kirchhoff 3D integral migration algorithm, which is suitable for seismic data processing, are described in this paper. Firstly, the inherent parallel characteristics of seismic data processing are analyzed. Then some principles in algorithm partition are discussed. Based on these analyses and the system architecture, communication mechanism, this algorithm is divided into four subtasks allocated to four nodes of 990 STAR-1. Then we describe in detail a module-partitioning method — the I/O rocessing and communication are separated from the computation process, the processes including I/O processing and communication are allocated to transputer T805 and the other is allocated to processor i860. These two processes are synchronized by shared memory and memory-lock mechanism, but the communication between different nodes is implemented through links of transputer. Load balance among four processor modules is performed dynamically. Finally, we discussed the speed-up of the parallel versions of prestack Kirchhoff 3D integral migration algorithm running on four nodes. Some further researches are also mentioned in this paper.