Massively parallel stochastic solution of the geophysical gravity problem

Abstract

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.