A Volunteer Computing Project for Solving Geoacoustic Inversion Problems

A volunteer computing project aimed at solving computationally hard inverse problems in underwater acoustics is described. This project was used to study the possibilities of the sound speed profile reconstruction in a shallow-water waveguide using a dispersion-based geoacoustic inversion scheme. The computational capabilities provided by the project allowed us to investigate the accuracy of the inversion for different mesh sizes of the sound speed profile discretization grid. This problem suits well for volunteer computing because it can be easily decomposed into independent simpler subproblems.