3D seismic imaging using high-performance parallel direct solver for large-scale finite element analysis

Estimation of oil and gas reservoirs depends on the exact analysis of 3D seismic images. For this, various kinds of seismic imaging techniques are used to image the subsurface geological structures. We introduce the SWEET algorithm which can calculate the traveltime and amplitude for Kirchhoff migration that is one of seismic imaging techniques. The SWEET algorithm is based on finite element method, and produces very big size linear equations with a huge number of right-hand side vectors. We propose the domain-wise multifrontal solver as the optimal solution method to implement the SWEET algorithm. The SWEET algorithm is successfully implemented and parallelized using our solver and the performance and scalability are shown. We will demonstrate the ability of our solver by solving the largest problem ever solved by direct solvers, and this will result in the highest quality seismic imaging of the 3D SEG/EAGE salt model