Three-dimensional massively parallel electromagnetic inversion—I. Theory

An iterative solution to the non-linear 3-D electromagnetic inverse problem is obtained by successive linearized model updates using the method of conjugate gradients. Full wave equation modelling for controlled sources is employed to compute model sensitivities and predicted data in the frequency domain with an efficient 3-D finite-difference algorithm. Necessity dictates that the inverse be underdetermined, since realistic reconstructions require the solution for tens of thousands of parameters. In addition, large-scale 3-D forward modelling is required and this can easily involve the solution of over several million electric field unknowns per solve. A massively parallel computing platform has therefore been utilized to obtain reasonable execution times, and results are given for the 1840-node Intel Paragon. The solution is demonstrated with a synthetic example with added Gaussian noise, where the data were produced from an integral equation forward-modelling code, and is different from the finite difference code embedded in the inversion algorithm