GPUPRSI: GPU implementation of seismic interferometry for retrieving reflection responses from passive source seismic recordings

Abstract

Passive seismic exploration is an environmentally friendly, economical, and highly accessible exploration method that is widely used in different-scale subsurface imaging. Retrieving reflections from ambient noise is a newly developed passive seismic method that can be used in many fields such as mineral exploration and near-surface imaging, but the interferometry calculation is time-consuming because it requires a longer period of data acquisition to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the retrieved reflections. In this study, we introduced a graphical processing unit (GPU)- based implementation of seismic interferometry for retrieving reflection responses from passive source seismic recordings. Because all traces are involved in the computation process, but the size of passive source data often exceeds available memory, repeated disk reads lead to a decrease in computational efficiency. We design a strategy of grouping computations followed by stacking to minimize disk input and output, simultaneously keeping the memory requirements low. Passive source data is read and written only once, and there is no requirement for the memory size to be greater than the data size. Additionally, acceleration technologies such as asynchronous execution, asynchronous memory transfer, and GPU-accelerated libraries are used. We test the efficiency using short data where the number of sampling points per trace is on the order of 30,000, and long data, where the number of sampling points per trace is on the order of 30,000,000. For short data, the average speedup is 4 compared with a multi-core central processing unit (CPU); for long data, the speedup can reach 24. The GPU-based implementation of interferometry greatly reduces the calculation time for retrieving reflections from passive source seismic recordings, providing a solution to the problem of large calculation in three-dimensional (3D) passive source reflection exploration.