Iterative Krylov solution methods for geophysical electromagnetic simulations on throughput-oriented processing units

• Published in: The international journal of high performance computing applications Vol. 26; no. 4; pp. 378 - 385
• Main Authors: Commer, Michael, Maia, Filipe RNC, Newman, Gregory A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01-11-2012; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: Boundary value problems; Computer simulation; COMPUTERS; Devices; ELECTROMAGNETISM; ENVIRONMENT; ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; GEOPHYSICS; GEOSCIENCES; Imaging; Iterative methods; Mathematical analysis; Mathematical models; PROCESSING; Simulation; Studies; Three dimensional; graphics processing unit; finite-difference methods; electromagnetic modeling; iterative Krylov methods; NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture; parallel solutions
• ISSN: 1094-3420; 1741-2846; 1741-2846
• DOI: 10.1177/1094342011428145

Many geo-scientific applications involve boundary value problems arising in simulating electrostatic and electromagnetic fields for geophysical prospecting and subsurface imaging of electrical resistivity. Modeling complex geological media with three-dimensional finite-difference grids gives rise to large sparse linear systems of equations. For such systems, we have implemented three common iterative Krylov solution methods on graphics processing units and compared their performance with parallel host-based versions. The benchmarks show that the device efficiency improves with increasing grid sizes. Limitations are currently given by the device memory resources.