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Overview
Reverse Time Migration (RTM) is a state-of-the-art technique for imaging subsurface geological structures from recorded seismic data. The strength of RTM stems from the fact that it fully respects the two-way acoustic wave equation, thus improving imaging in areas where complex geology violates the assumptions made in Kirchhoff or one-way wave equation migrations.
However, the superior imaging capability of RTM comes at the cost of extremely intensive computational and memory requirements. For each shot, at least two full finite-difference wave propagations must be performed to simulate the advance of seismic energy through the subsurface. A seismic survey might cover an area of several thousand km2 to a depth of 5-10 km and include 1000s of shots. Each shot requires the computation of wavefield amplitudes at 100s of millions of finite difference cells for thousands of time steps. [...]
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