Parallel Ray Tracing for Underwater Acoustic Predictions

Different applications of underwater acoustics frequently rely on the calculation of transmissions loss (TL), which is obtained from predictions of acoustic pressure provided by an underwater acoustic model. Such predictions are computationally intensive when dealing with three-dimensional environments. Parallel processing can be used to mitigate the computational burden and improve the performance of calculations, by splitting the computational workload into several tasks, which can be allocated on multiple processors to run concurrently. This paper addresses an Open MPI based parallel implementation of a three-dimensional ray tracing model for predictions of acoustic pressure. Data from a tank scale experiment, providing waveguide parameters and TL measurements, are used to test the accuracy of the ray model and the performance of the proposed parallel implementation. The corresponding speedup and efficiency are also discussed. In order to provide a complete reference runtimes and TL predictions from two additional underwater acoustic models are also considered.