pDSurfTomo: A High-Performance Parallel Computing Package for Direct Surface Wave Tomography

TL;DR

pDSurfTomo is a high-performance, GPU-accelerated package for surface wave tomography that significantly reduces computation time and enhances scalability for large-scale seismic imaging.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid CPU-GPU parallel framework with a GUI, improving scalability and efficiency over the serial DSurfTomo for high-resolution tomography.

Findings

Reduces computation time by over an order of magnitude.

Maintains negligible discrepancy compared to original DSurfTomo.

Supports large-scale, high-resolution surface wave tomography.

Abstract

Surface wave tomography is essential for investigating the shear-wave velocity structure of the crust and upper mantle. The direct surface wave tomography method, DSurfTomo, has become one of the most widely adopted packages due to its ability to account for ray path bending in complex media to increase subsurface characterization accuracy. However, its inherent serial architecture lacks effective support for multicore CPUs and GPUs. Furthermore, its built-in solver is computationally expensive when solving large-scale linear systems. Consequently, the software struggles to meet current demands for large-scale, high-resolution surface wave tomography. To address these limitations, we propose pDSurfTomo, a highly optimized package utilizing hybrid CPU-GPU acceleration. First, it overcomes the scalability bottleneck in sensitivity kernel computation through a refined parallel design; also, it uses vectorization techniques to accelerate the modeling of surface wave dispersion, achieving efficient computation of the sensitivity kernel. Second, it implements parallelization of the serial fast marching method using OpenMP, significantly reducing computation time for surface wave traveltimes. Finally, it incorporates GPU acceleration to efficiently solve large-scale sparse linear least-squares problems. To streamline the workflow, we provide a cross-platform GUI with remote server connectivity, allowing users to execute and visualize inversion tasks locally while seamlessly utilizing remote computing clusters. Application to an observed dispersion dataset from 229 stations in North China demonstrates that pDSurfTomo reduces computation time by more than an order of magnitude while maintaining a negligible discrepancy compared to the original DSurfTomo. It is expected that pDSurfTomo will provide a highly efficient and accessible solution for large-scale, high-resolution surface wave tomography.