A Parallel Processing Approach to Acoustic Tomography

Acoustic tomography is a widely utilized technique to reconstruct material properties from global wave propagation data. One of the main drawbacks to using tomography is the computationally intensive nature of the reconstruction algorithm. In this work, a new computational approach to acoustic tomography is presented using a computer with a massively parallel architecture (Connection Machine CM200). The objective was to develop a tomographic reconstruction algorithm, including ray tracing, which fully utilized the simultaneous computation capability of the Connection Machine. The modifications necessary to implement tomographic reconstructions in parallel are described. Results are presented for several synthetic reconstructions. The CPU time required for the parallel program remains relatively constant as the problem size increases, whereas the CPU time for a serial program increases rapidly. This illustrates the utility of this approach for complex problems.