Parallel Kirchhoff Pre-Stack Depth Migration on Large High Performance Clusters

Kirchhoff Pre-Stack Depth Migration (KPSDM) is a widely used algorithm for seismic imaging in petroleum industry. To provide higher FLOPS, modern high performance clusters are equipped with more computing nodes and more cores for each node. The evolution style of clusters leads to two problems for upper layer applications such as KPSDM: (1) the increasing disparity of the I/O capacity and computing performance is becoming a bottleneck for higher scalability; (2) the decreasing Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) limits the availability of the applications. In this paper, we present an optimized parallel implementation of KPSDM to adapt to modern clusters. First, we convert the KPSDM into a clear and simple task-based parallel application by decomposing the computation along two dimensions: the imaging space and seismic data. Then, those tasks are mapped to computing nodes that are organized using a two-level master/worker architecture to reduce the I/O workloads. And each task is further parallelized using multi-cores to fully utilize the computing resources. Finally, fault tolerance and checkpoint are implemented to meet the availability requirement in production environments. Experimental results with practical seismic data show that our parallel implementation of KPSDM can scale smoothly from 51 nodes (816 cores) to 211 nodes (3376 cores) with low I/O workloads on the I/O sub-system and multiple process failures can be tolerated efficiently.