High‐order finite difference modeling on reconfigurable computing platform

Abstract

High‐order finite difference schemes are always considered appropriate for seismic modeling applications because of their excellent numerical properties in dispersion, dissipation, and anisotropy. However, these algorithms are too computationally intensive to be used routinely, especially for 3D acoustic and elastic modeling cases. In this paper, an inexpensive Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based reconfigurable computing (RC) platform is proposed to accelerate the execution of ordinary secondorder and high‐order FD schemes. Our early experiments demonstrated 4 X ∼ 19 X performance improvements for different FD schemes comparing with their conventional pure software solutions running on a 3.0GHz referential Linux workstation. This RC platform is also consistent with the prevailing PC‐Cluster systems and can achieve much better price‐performance ratio along with much lower power consumption.