Full waveform seismic inversion using a distributed system of computers

The aim of seismic waveform inversion is to estimate the elastic properties of the Earth’s subsurface layers from recordings of seismic waveform data. This is usually accomplished by using constrained optimization often based on very simplistic assumptions. Full waveform inversion uses a more accurate wave propagation model but is extremely difficult to use for routine analysis and interpretation. This is because computational difficulties arise due to: (1) strong nonlinearity of the inverse problem; (2) extreme ill-posedness; and (3) large dimensions of data and model spaces. We show that some of these difficulties can be overcome by using: (1) an improved forward problem solver and efficient technique to generate sensitivity matrix; (2) an iteration adaptive regularized truncated Gauss–Newton technique; (3) an efficient technique for matrix–matrix and matrix–vector multiplication; and (4) a parallel programming implementation with a distributed system of processors. We use a message-passing interface in the parallel programming environment. We present inversion results for synthetic and field data, and a performance analysis of our parallel implementation. Copyright c © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.