Implementation of seismic data inversion as grid-backed web service

Abstract

The essence of probability approach in solving inverse problems is use of a posteriory probability density function (APDF). APDF bears a priory system signature and the way the corresponding model parameter set describes the observational data. APDF importance sampling is carried out independently in different points thus the problem is a good target for distributed computing. The software implementation make use of virtualization to lower the hardware cost: all Globus Toolkit services, except for GridFTP, run as virtual guests on execution nodes. Due to very insignificant resources utilization the guests make no footprint on node's computation power. The execution nodes local resource manager is TORQUE. The main thought for web interface is to hide complex middleware interaction from user. Such interaction usually takes place during start-up and result collection and analysis procedures. The implemented minimalistic web service allows defining of models, estimation of calculation time for user-specified parameter set, task start-up, management, results acquisition and visualization. The specific pilot problem we implemented is determination of seismic anisotropy of mantle and upper crust by teleseismic data.