Exploiting Asynchronous Priority Scheduling in Parallel Eikonal Solvers

Abstract: Numerical solutions to the Eikonal equation are computed using variants of the fast marching method, the fast sweeping method, and the fast iterative method. In this paper, we provide a unified view of these algorithms that highlights their similarities and suggests a wider class of Eikonal solvers. We then use this framework to justify applying concurrent priority scheduling techniques to Eikonal solvers. We demonstrate that doing so results in good parallel performance for a problem from seismology. We explain why existing Eikonal solvers may produce different results despite using the same differencing scheme and demonstrate techniques to address these discrepancies. These techniques allow us to obtain deterministic output from our asynchronous fine-grained parallel Eikonal solver.