The growth of data to be processed in the Oil & Gas industry matches the
requirements imposed by evolving algorithms based on stencil computations, such
as Full Waveform Inversion and Reverse Time Migration. Graphical processing
units (GPUs) are an attractive architectural target for stencil computations
because of its high degree of data parallelism. However, the rapid
architectural and technological progression makes it difficult for even the
most proficient programmers to remain up-to-date with the technological
advances at a micro-architectural level. In this work, we present an extension
for an open source compiler designed to produce highly optimized finite
difference kernels for use in inversion methods named Devito. We embed it with
the Oxford Parallel Domain Specific Language (OP-DSL) in order to enable
automatic code generation for GPU architectures from a high-level
representation. We aim to enable users coding in a symbolic representation
level to effortlessly get their implementations leveraged by the processing
capacities of GPU architectures. The implemented backend is evaluated on a
NVIDIA GTX Titan Z, and on a NVIDIA Tesla V100 in terms of operational
intensity through the roof-line model for varying space-order discretization
levels of 3D acoustic isotropic wave propagation stencil kernels with and
without symbolic optimizations. It achieves approximately 63% of V100's peak
performance and 24% of Titan Z's peak performance for stencil kernels over
grids with 256 points. Our study reveals that improving memory usage should be
the most efficient strategy for leveraging the performance of the implemented
solution on the evaluated architectures.