Massively parallel stochastic solution of the geophysical gravity problem
For geophysicists in mineral exploration, this stochastic method provides a parallelizable alternative to deterministic solvers, though it is incremental as it applies existing stochastic techniques to a new domain.
The paper demonstrates that a stochastic algorithm for solving the Poisson equation in geophysical gravity problems is embarrassingly parallel and achieves accurate results for gravitational potential and acceleration, offering an alternative to deterministic methods in mineral exploration.
In this paper, we report the advantages of using a stochastic algorithm in the context of mineral exploration based on gravity measurements. This approach has the advantage over deterministic methods in that it allows one to find the solution of the Poisson equation in specified, isolated points without the need of meshing the computational domain and solving the Poisson equation over the entire domain. Moreover, the stochastic approach is embarrassingly parallelizable and therefore suitable for an implementation on multi-core compute clusters with or without GPUs. Benchmark tests are carried out that show that the stochastic approach can yield accurate results for both the gravitational potential and the gravitational acceleration and could hence provide an alternative to existing deterministic methods used in mineral exploration.