The method of polarized traces for the 3D Helmholtz equation

Abstract: We present a fast solver for the 3D high-frequency Helmholtz equation in heterogeneous, constant density, acoustic media. The solver is based on the method of polarized traces, coupled with distributed linear algebra libraries and pipelining to obtain an empirical online runtime $ \mathcal{O}(\max(1,R/n) N \log N)$ where $N = n^3$ is the total number of degrees of freedom and $R$ is the number of right-hand sides. Such a favorable scaling is a prerequisite for large-scale implementations of full waveform inversion (FWI) in frequency domain.