Patent ID: 8781748

Claim:
A system for generating images related to a subsurface region of interest, comprising: a data storage device having seismic data and an earth model related to the subsurface region of interest; at least one central processing unit (CPU) in communication with the data storage device, the CPU comprising at least one processing core and associated CPU memory; at least one external co-processor in communication with the CPU, the external co-processor comprising at least one external co-processor processing core directly coupled to a corresponding local memory, and wherein the external co-processor processing core comprises computer programmable code for forward propagating a source wavefield using the earth model at a first time interval; transferring, at a second time interval, the forward propagated source wavefield to the CPU for compression and external storage; backward propagating the seismic data at the first time interval to derive backward propagated receiver wavefield; and transferring, at the second time interval, the backward propagated receiver wavefield to the CPU; wherein the CPU processing core is programmed to retrieve and decompress the forward propagated source wavefield data and apply imaging conditions to the decompressed forward propagated source wavefield and the backward propagated receiver wavefield to construct image data representative of the subsurface region of interest.