Patent Document ID: 9291734
Application ID: 13363966
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer-implemented method for creating a Reverse Time Migration seismic model of sub-surface formations in a defined 2D or 3D volume of a geological structure using a Full Waveform Inversion computation, said method comprising: partitioning a velocity model domain representing a subsurface structure of the earth in said defined volume into a plurality of blocks, each block having an associated processing task for processing wave data associated with a shot; assigning each partitioned domain block to processing nodes of a distributed processing parallel computer device having a plurality of processing nodes interconnected through one or more communication networks; receiving, at a local storage device associated with a respective processing node, a trace data representing measurement of each wave produced by a shot of a sequence of plural shots, each local storage device comprising a local cache or flash memory storage device coupled with a processor device at the processing node; computing, in parallel, using said associated processing tasks operating on said received trace data associated with a shot at each said processing node, contributions of forward wave propagation data and reverse wave propagation data at that node, said reverse wave propagation data computed using a residual data from forward wave propagation data computing, wherein said forward or reverse wave propagation data contributions are computed at the processing node and stored at the local cache or flash memory storage device at the processing node; and using said computed forward wave propagation data and reverse wave propagation data contributions stored at the local cache or flash memory storage device at the processing node to compute a correction term from which the seismic model is updated, the seismic model updating including, for each shot, iteratively performing: computing, in parallel, said contributions of forward wave propagation data; obtaining said residual data representing a difference between said received trace data and data from said forward wave propagation computations; determining an accuracy of said seismic model based on said obtained residual data; and updating said seismic model based on said determining, the updated seismic model minimizing an error in modeling the sub-surface formations.