Performance Evaluation of Optimized Implementations of Finite Difference Method for Wave Propagation Problems on GPU Architecture

The scattering of acoustic waves in non-homogeneous media has been of practical interest for the petroleum industry, mainly in the determination of new oil deposits. A family of computational models that represent this phenomenon is based on finite difference methods. The simulation of these phenomena demands a high computational cost. In this work we employ GPU for the development of solvers for a 2D wave propagation problem with finite difference methods. Although there are many related works that use the same implementation presented in this paper, we propose a detailed and novel performance and memory bottleneck analysis for this hardware architecture.