Reverse Time Migration

Software for accelerated processing of RTM

Reverse Time Migration (RTM) is the current ‘state-of-the-art’ in seismic imaging. 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. Until recently, RTM’s widespread use was severely hindered by the enormous computing resources required to process the data. This computational bottleneck is now cleared with Acceleware’s AxRTM™ solution.

AxRTM provides the core numerical functionality of Reverse Time Migration as a library that can be integrated into an existing seismic processing framework. AxRTM has a modular architecture supporting a variety of integrator-specific functionality, and currently supports both optimized multi-core CPU and NVIDIA GPU hardware.

Features and Specifications

The table below shows major components of the AxRTM library. The architecture of AxRTM is designed to allow for the addition of geophysical functionality in a modular fashion. This allows an Integrator who has their own RTM expertise to incorporate their proprietary methods above and/or into the API.

Currently supported hardware is Intel/AMD multi-core CPU and NVIDIA GPUs. Support for future computational hardware was part of the fundamental design of the AxRTM library, meaning that adopting a new hardware platform in the future will not require any changes to the overlying RTM application.

The Importance of Anisotropic Reverse Time Migration

Move the mouse over the picture to show how isotropic imaging of this anisotropic dataset fails to image the salt flanks and mis-positions the sub-salt sediments. In the TTI image, the salt flanks are clearly defined and the sediments imaged right up to the salt boundary.

Domain Decomposition

For large RTM volumes, AxRTM decomposes the domain across multiple compute nodes. Acceleware fully supports the spanning of a single migration volume across both multiple GPUs/CPUs on a single compute node, as well as multiple compute nodes (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Compute nodes are dynamically grouped into Shot Groups to work on very large migration volumes.

Buy: Purchase your production ready RTM application from Paradigm Geophysical or Tsunami Development. These proven end-to-end solutions are ready to run today.

Build: Using, AxRTM library as the computational engine Acceleware can build and integrate an RTM solution to meet your needs. This provides a tailored solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing processing workflow. Please contact your Acceleware representative for more information.