Pseudospectral method is an efficient and high accuracy numerical method for simulating seismic wave propaga- tion in heterogeneous earth medium. Since its derivative operator is global, this method is commonly considered not suitable for parallel computation. In this paper, we introduce the parallel overlap domain decomposition scheme and give a parallel pseudospectral method implemented on distributed memory PC cluster system for modeling seismic wave propagation in heterogeneous medium. In this parallel method, the medium is decomposed into several subdomains and the wave equations are solved in each subdomain simultaneously. The solutions in each subdomain are connected through the transferring at the overlapped region. Using 2D models, we compared the parallel and traditional pseudospectral method, analyzed the accuracy of the parallel method. The results show that the parallel method can efficiently reduce computation time for the same accuracy as the traditional method. This method could be applied to large scale modeling of seismic wave propagation in 3D heterogeneous medium.
