Reverse-Time Migration (RTM) is a state-of-the-art technique in seismic acoustic imaging, because of the quality and integrity of the images it provides. Oil and gas companies trust RTM with crucial decisions on multi-million-dollar drilling investments. But RTM requires vastly more computational power than its predecessor techniques, and this has somewhat hindered its practical success. On the other hand, despite multi-core architectures promise to deliver unprecedented computational power, little attention has been devoted to mapping efficiently RTM to multi-cores. In this paper, we present a mapping of the RTM computational kernel to the IBM Cell/B.E. processor that reaches close-to-optimal performance. The kernel proves to be memory-bound and it achieves a 98% utilization of the peak memory bandwidth. Our Cell/B.E. implementation outperforms a traditional processor (PowerPC 970MP) in terms of performance (with an 15.0× speedup) and energy-efficiency (with a 10.0× increase in the GFlops/W delivered). Also, it is the fastest RTM implementation available to the best of our knowledge. These results increase the practical usability of RTM. Also, the RTM-Cell/B.E. combination proves to be a strong competitor in the seismic arena.

中文翻译：

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通过均质和异构多核处理器上的逆时偏移进行3D地震成像

逆时偏移（RTM）是地震声成像中的一种最新技术，因为它提供了图像的质量和完整性。石油和天然气公司相信RTM拥有数百万美元钻探投资的关键决策。但是RTM比其先前的技术需要更多的计算能力，这在某种程度上阻碍了它的实际成功。另一方面，尽管多核体系结构有望提供空前的计算能力，但很少有人致力于将RTM有效映射到多核。在本文中，我们提出了RTM计算内核到达到最佳性能的IBM Cell / BE处理器的映射。事实证明，该内核是受内存限制的，并且可以实现98％的峰值内存带宽利用率。我们的细胞/ BE 在性能（提速15.0倍）和能效（交付的GFlops / W增加10.0倍）方面，实现优于传统处理器（PowerPC 970MP）。而且，据我们所知，它是最快的RTM实现。这些结果提高了RTM的实用性。同样，RTM-Cell / BE组合在地震领域被证明是强大的竞争对手。