Abstract: In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, methods are provided for Kirchhoff-migrating seismic data using a parallel computer. The methods of the present invention preferably use a multiprocessor machine that is interconnected to form a hypercube. The presently preferred method is to build up one or more migrated output traces in each processor (node) designated as a "migration" processor, as input traces are passed from migration node to migration node along a nearest-neighbor chain. When an output trace is completed, it is sent by a migration node to storage via an appropriate I/O processor and the migration node beings building a new output trace. There is essentially no limit to the length of seismic line which can be so migrated. Alternatively, the input traces may be held in the migration nodes and the output traces passed from node to node along a nearest-neighbor chain, or the input and output traces may be passed in opposite directions along the chain.

Abstract: A design is disclosed for a cellular computer consisting of many processors, of two kinds, connected in the form of a tree. The computer is intended for the highly parallel execution of programs written in an applicative programming language. The program is stored in the leaf cells of the tree. The computer uses the syntactic structure of the program to guide the embedding of a network of "syntactic nodes" in the tree of machine cells, and execution of the program is accomplished through operations performed by the embedded network of nodes. This computer can execute many user programs simultaneously, it can take advantage of all the parallelism expressed in each user program (storage space permitting), and it can perform in parallel many operations below the level expressed in the user programs.