Electromagnetic methods (EM) are an invaluable research tool in geophysics whose relevance has increased rapidly in recent years due to its wide industrial adoption. In particular, the forward modelling of three-dimensional marine controlled-source electromagnetics (3D CSEM FM) has become an important technique for reducing ambiguities in the interpretation of geophysical datasets through mapping conductivity variations
in the subsurface. As a consequence, the 3D CSEM FM has real application in many areas such as hydrocarbon and mineral exploration, reservoir monitoring, CO₂ storage characterization, geothermal reservoir imaging and many others due to there quantities often displaying conductivity contrasts with respect to their surrounding sediments. However, the 3D CSEM FM at real scale implies a numerical challenge that requires an important computational effort, often too high for modest multicore computing architectures, especially if it fuels an inversion process. In this regard, the 3D CSEM FM is a key application that can benefit strongly from algorithmic and computational improvements.

 

On the other hand, although the High-performance Computing (HPC) code development is dominated by compiled languages, the popularity of high-level languages for scientific computations has increased considerably. Among all of them, Python is probably the language that has shown more interest, mainly because of flexibility and its simple and clean syntax. However, its use for HPC geophysical applications is still limited, which suggests a path for research, development and improvement.

 

On top of that,  my research work focuses on numerical methods applied to geophysics and their parallel programming in supercomputing architectures. More concretely, I research and develop flexible and efficient HPC algorithms for electromagnetic modeling and inversion in the geophysics context. The net result of this effort is the PETGEM code (http://petgem.bsc.es) of which I am the main developer. PETGEM is a new HPC tool for electromagnetic modeling based on the edge finite element method (including high-order variants). Furthermore, I am interested in wave modeling using pseudospectral methods.