Lionel Boillot defended his PhD

Contributions to the mathematical modeling and to the parallel algorithmic for the optimization of an elastic wave propagator in anisotropic media

The most common method of Seismic Imaging is the RTM (Reverse Time Migration) which depends on wave propagation simulations in the subsurface. We focused on a 3D elastic wave propagator in anisotropic media, more precisely TTI (Tilted Transverse Isotropic). We directly worked in the Total code DIVA (Depth Imaging Velocity Analysis) which is based on a discretization by the Discontinuous Galerkin method and the Leap-Frog scheme, and developed for intensive parallel computing – HPC (High Performance Computing). We choose to especially target two contributions. Although they required very different skills, they share the same goal: to reduce the computational cost of the simulation. On one hand, classical boundary conditions like PML (Perfectly Matched Layers) are unstable in TTI media. We have proposed a formulation of a stable ABC (Absorbing Boundary Condition) in anisotropic media. The technique is based on slowness curve properties, giving to our approach an original side. On the other hand, the initial parallelism, which is based on a domain decomposition and communications by message passing through the MPI library, leads to load-imbalance and so poor parallel efficiency. We have fixed this issue by replacing the paradigm for parallelism by the use of task-based programming through runtime system.

elastic wave equation, TTI (Tilted Transverse Isotropy) anisotropy, Absorbing Boundary Conditions, task-based parallel programming, HPC (High-Performance Computing)