Large-scale explicit wave simulations on the CRAY-2 (Q1098269)

The authors give some discrete time-domain wave propagation problems in geophysics which are implemented and solved on a CRAY-2. This supercomputer was the largest and fastest ``conventional'' available at the time of the calculations (mid 1987). It uses 256 million words of the CMOS memory (typically). The principal advantage of the CRAY-2 over earlier CRAYs is the large memory. The factor of two or three in speed is also significant, but not the principal reason for the choice. The subject of this work are the applications in 2-D and 3-D geophysical modeling. The treatment of this subject shows that many problems which where intractable by classical analysis methods, due principally to nonseparability and to nonlinearity, are now problems, where with discrete numerical methods and by means of supercomputers, one can arrive at the solution.