Because constant-velocity DMO in a 3-D Earth model operates along curves, care must be taken in parallel implementation in order to avoid the waste of computational capacity. Trace processing algorithms require a great deal of inter-processor communications and leave many processors idle during the process. On the other hand, the processing of time slices is well adapted to the irregular geometry of 3-D land data, reaching a load balance of eighty percent. Although the anti-aliasing convolution is more quickly performed along traces, the efficient utilization of computational capacity compensates for a slower convolution in the time slices.
The efficiency of the time slice processing has not been verified in three dimensions yet; however, the results of this study are encouraging.