Electromagnetic imaging by four dimensional parallel computing

Method for organizing computer operations on a system of parallel processors to invert electromagnetic field data (11) from a controlled-source electromagnetic survey of a subsurface region to estimate resistivity structure (12) within the subsurface region. Each data processor in a bank of processors simultaneously solves Maxwell's equations (13) for its assigned geometrical subset of the data volume (14). Other computer banks are simultaneously doing the same thing for data associated with a different source frequency, position or orientation, providing a "fourth dimension" parallelism, where the fourth dimension requires minimal data passing (15). In preferred embodiments, a time limit is set after which all processor calculations are terminated, whether or not convergence has been reached.