Enabling wave-based inversion on GPUs with randomized trace estimation

Abstract: By building on recent advances in the use of randomized trace estimation to drastically reduce the memory footprint of adjoint-state methods, we present and validate an imaging approach that can be executed exclusively on accelerators. Results obtained on field-realistic synthetic datasets, which include salt and anisotropy, show that our method produces high-fidelity images. These findings open the enticing perspective of 3D wave-based inversion technology with a memory footprint that matches the hardware and that runs exclusively on clusters of GPUs without the undesirable need to offload certain tasks to CPUs.