Accelerating Pre‐stack Kirchhoff Time Migration by Manual Vectorization

Abstract

SummaryThe Pre‐stack Kirchhoff Time Migration (PKTM) is a central process in petroleum exploration. As PKTM is computationally intensive, many works have proposed the use of accelerators like GPU and FPGA to improve its execution time. On the other hand, although many off‐the‐shelf processors are endowed with a set of SIMD vector instructions, few papers tackle the problem considering vectorization and all of them consider that compilers can successfully vectorize the code. In this paper, we show that programming PKTM by using SIMD vector instructions manually is more efficient than the automatically and semi‐automatically vectorized codes, provided by a hardware specific compiler and library. Experiments considering both real and synthetic datasets showed that our solution is more than four times faster than the traditional code. It also outperformed automatically vectorized codes in all tests. We believe that the proposed strategy can be used together with the other ones to accelerate seismic migration methods in general without new investments in hardware. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.