Auto-Tuning for OpenMP Dynamic Scheduling applied to Full Waveform Inversion

Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) is a widely used method in seismic data processing, capable of estimating models that represent the characteristics of the geological layers of the subsurface. Because it works with a massive amount of data, the execution of this method requires much time and computational resources, being restricted to large-scale computer systems such as supercomputers. Techniques such as FWI adapt well to parallel computing and can be parallelized in shared memory systems using the application programming interface (API) OpenMP. The management of parallel tasks can be performed through loop schedulers contained in OpenMP. The dynamic scheduler stands out for distributing predefined fixed-size chunk sizes to idle processing cores at runtime. It can better adapt to FWI, where data processing can be irregular. However, the relationship between the size of the chunk size and the runtime is unknown. Optimization techniques can employ meta-heuristics to explore the parameter search space, avoiding testing all possible solutions. Here, we propose a strategy to use the Parameter Auto-Tuning for Shared Memory Algorithms (PATSMA), with Coupled Simulated Annealing (CSA) as its optimization method, to automatically adjust the chunk size for the dynamic scheduling of wave propagation, one of the most expensive steps in FWI. Since testing each candidate chunk size in the complete FWI is unpractical, our approach consists of running a PATSMA where the objective function is the runtime of the first time iteration of the first seismic shot of the first FWI iteration. The resulting chunk size is then employed in all wave propagations involved in an FWI. We conducted tests to measure the runtime of an FWI using the proposed auto-tuning, varying the problem size and running on different computational environments, such as supercomputers and cloud computing instances. The results show that applying the proposed auto-tuning in an FWI reduces its runtime by up to 70.46% compared to standard OpenMP schedulers.