Research Area: Working with his collaborators, Art Petrenko has developped a seismic wave simulator on a heterogeneous computing platform consisting of a conventional host processor and a reconfigurable hardware accelerator. By taking advantage of the accelerator chip's deep pipeline parallelism, the solution of the forward seismic problem was sped up by more than a factor of two compared to one core of the conventional processor working alone. The main contribution of this work is an implementation of the Kaczmarz row projection algorithm on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), using techniques of dataflow programming. This kernel is used as the preconditioning step of CGMN, a modified version of the conjugate gradients method that is used to solve the time-harmonic acoustic isotropic constant density wave equation. This research is important in the field of exploration for oil and gas resources, where a 3D model of the subsurface of the Earth is frequently required. By comparing seismic data collected in a real-world survey with synthetic data generated by simulated waves, it is possible to deduce such a model--this process known as full-waveform inverison (FWI). However FWI requires many time-consuming simulations with different Earth models to find the one that best fits the measured data. Speeding up the wave simulations allows more models to be tried, yielding a more accurate estimate of the subsurface. Art's previous work with SLIM has included multi-threading a version of the Kaczmarz algorithm written in C and callable from MATLAB via a MEX file interface.

About me: Art Petrenko completed his B.Sc. in Physics at Mcgill University in 2008, and joined SLIM in September 2011 under the supervision of Dr. Felix Herrmann. He graduated from UBC with an M.Sc. in Geophysics in May 2014.