Fast parallel solution of heterogeneous 3D time-harmonic wave equations

Several advancements related to the solution of 3D time-harmonic wave equations are presented, especially in the context of a parallel moving-PML sweeping preconditioner for problems without large-scale resonances. The main contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of an efficient parallel sweeping preconditioner and its subsequent application to several challenging velocity models. For instance, 3D seismic problems approaching a billion degrees of freedom have been solved in just a few minutes using several thousand processors. The setup and application costs of the sequential algorithm were also respectively refined to O(γ^2 N^(4/3)) and O(γ N log N), where N denotes the total number of degrees of freedom in the 3D volume and γ(ω) denotes the modestly frequency-dependent number of grid points per Perfectly Matched Layer discretization.

Furthermore, high-performance parallel algorithms are proposed for performing multifrontal triangular solves with many right-hand sides, and a custom compression scheme is introduced which builds upon the translation invariance of free-space Green’s functions in order to justify the replacement of each dense matrix within a certain modified multifrontal method with the sum of a small number of Kronecker products. For the sake of reproducibility, every algorithm exercised within this dissertation is made available as part of the open source packages Clique and Parallel Sweeping Preconditioner (PSP).