This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will demonstrate the feasibility of significantly increasing the speed and accuracy of acoustic and elastic wave field simulations in 3-D heterogeneous materials by using arrays of digital signal processors (DSPs ) in conjunction with a new wave field modeling algorithm. The DSPs will perform the floating point operations of the algorithm by functioning as the processing elements in a parallel computing environment. A multi-processor system based on this concept could achieve supercomputer performance at a small fraction of the cost. The resulting system would, for the first time, make wave field simulation a practical and cost-effective tool for industrial applications to subterranean imaging and earthquake hazards analysis. The most appropriate existing DSP board for the application will be identified. A workstation computer will be configured with DSP modeling software and with the wave field simulation software. The system will be tested, and performance will be optimized. The system's performance potential will be compared to the software's performance on a supercomputer and on a network of workstations. The proposed system could be of immediate use as a practical tool for improving subterranean and medical imaging techniques and for earthquake hazards studies.
Potential commercial applications of the research include 1) improving subterranean imaging for oil and gas exploration, 2) providing synthetic data sets for the development and testing of medical imaging systems, 3) ground motion maps for scenario earthquakes in complicated Earth structures, 4) non-destructive testing and failure analysis of solid materials, and 5) industrial and educational applications of high performance computing.
