Modeling elastic wave propagation using PyOpenCL

This work presents an implementation of elastic wave propagation using finite differences to model 2D anisotropic materials and to simulate sonic waves along a borehole in a heterogeneous formation (in cylindrical coordinates) accelerated by using the new parallel computing devices (PCDs). For that purpose we use the industry open standard Open Computing Language (OpenCL) and an open-source toolkit called PyOpenCL. We describe the code and give a performance test in terms of speed using six different computing devices under different operating systems. A maximum speedup factor over 34.2, using the GPU is attained when compared with the execution of the same program in parallel using a CPU quad-core. To provide the scientific community with an open tool for numerical simulation of elastic wave propagation that runs on the PCDs, the full implementation of both problems is included as an open source.