Elastic 3D Wavefield Simulation on budget GPUs using the GLSL shading language

Forward wavefield simulation is an important step in Full Waveform Inversion systems. Fast simulations are instrumental to get inversion result in reasonable time frames. Most of research and software aims towards utilizing costly computer clusters composed of multiple CPUs and numerous high end GPUs to shorten the forward simulation time. Using this type of hardware has some disadvantages as: high cost, complex programming models and unavailability of resources. In this work, we present a finite difference elastic 3D wavefield forward simulation that takes advantage of any modern low end GPU, by using the GLSL shading language.Some of the advantages of using GLSL are: runs in any modern GPU, has a simplified computing and memory model and provides state of art performance thanks to its very well optimized vendor developed drivers. We show that our GLSL implementation easily outperforms a multicore CPU implementation in a modern PC. We further benchmark our result using a real seismic event, and show that we can get accurate simulations in reasonable time using our system.