Wave-based inversion at scale on GPUs with randomized trace estimation

Thanks to continued performance improvements in software and hardware, wave-equation based imaging technologies, such full-waveform inversion and reverse-time migration, are becoming more common place. However, wide-spread adaptation of these advanced imaging modalities has not yet materialized because current implementations are not able to reap the full benefits from accelerators, in particular those offered by memory-scarce graphics processing units. Through the use of randomized trace estimation, we overcome the memory bottleneck of this type of hardware. At the cost of limited computational overhead and controllable incoherent errors in the gradient, the memory footprint of adjoint-state methods is reduced drastically. Thanks to this relatively simple to implement memory reduction via an approximate imaging condition, we are able to benefit from graphics processing units without memory offloading. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm on acoustic 2- and 3-D full-waveform inversion examples and on the formation of image gathers in transverse tilted isotropic media.