Parallel 2D Seismic Ray Tracing Using Cuda on a Jetson Nano

Abstract

We present a parallel implementation of a 2D seismic ray tracer on a graphics processing unit of the compact Jetson Nano by Nvidia. Ray tracing is commonly used in seismic imaging as an intermediate step in reconstructing subsurface structures. We employ a gradient-based ray tracer that requires a travel time map. Here, we make use of the fast iterative method that computes a travel time map in a parallel fashion. Since a ray path is independent from any other ray path, the tracing can be implemented in parallel as well. To this end, we use a graphics processing unit and implement ray tracing using the CUDA programming language. For performance evaluations we compare our implementation on the Jetson Nano to a state-of-the-art sequential seismic ray tracer on a desktop CPU and show that speedups with factors of up to three can be achieved. The results indicate that edge devices such as the Jetson Nano can play a relevant role for tomographic applications particularly in scenarios where mobility of processing devices and compactness are important.