Abstract:

 

In this talk I will address the computational and mathematical challenges presented by the seismic inverse problem known as full waveform inversion, where empirical observations of wave propagation are used to recover the earth’s structure.  I will start from a simple formulation of the problem and gradually increase the complexity along many axes, considering advances in numerical techniques, geophysical need, HPC hardware and programming models, and the evolution of oil and gas exploration.  Along the way I will highlight new developments in these areas, including our recent work on high frequency 3D Helmholtz solvers and recent developments in discontinuous Galerkin solvers in seismic contexts.

 

 

 

Bio:

 

Russell is currently Research Scientist in the Computational Science and Engineering Department in Total S.A.’s Houston research center.  He earned in Ph.D. in computer science with a specialty in CSE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, where he was a NASA Graduate Student Research Program fellow working on inverse problems in 3D solar imaging.  Subsequently, he was a postdoc in the Imaging and Computing Group in the mathematics department at MIT, where he first began working on inverse problems in geoscience.