High performance FPGA-based coprocessor platform for accelerating Kirchhoff migration

A reconfigurable coprocessor platform called SPACE (Seismic data Processing Accelerator with reConfigurable Engine) for speeding up 3D prestack Kirchhoffray-bending time migration (PSTM) using Field Program mable Gate Array (FPGA) technology is proposed.The time-consuming kernel part of the PSTM procedure is programmed into the FPGA-based coprocessor plat form, which acts as a hardware accelerator attached to an Intel-based workstation through the local Peripheral Controller Interface (PCI) bus.Improved performance can be achieved by integrating many parallel-running fully pipelined arithmetic units into a single FPGA chip.Our simulation shows that the SPACE plat form operating at a conservative speed of 50 MHz can calculate the Kirchhoff summations for 50 million points per second, which is about 15.6 times faster than a referential 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 workstation.The reconfigurable property of the proposed platform combined with the impressive performance implies its broad applications in the seismic data processing industry.