Parallel implementation of ray tracing procedure in anisotropic medium

This article describes a parallel implementation of a ray tracing algorithm in a heterogeneous anisotropic geological medium. The shortest path method, which was used for calculations, can give ray path and travel time of seismic wave propagation even for a random and discontinuous velocity field. The high precision required in such calculations was obtained by employing a dense computational grid. This led to a significant increase in the computational effort of the algorithm. The procedure was parallelized using domain decomposition. The results show that the parallel performance of the ray tracing procedure strongly depends on the assumed geological method and differs between media with and without anisotropy of seismic wave propagation.