We describe three approaches for computing a gravity signal from a density
anomaly. The first approach consists of the classical "summation" technique,
whilst the remaining two methods solve the Poisson problem for the
gravitational potential using either a Finite Element (FE) discretization
employing a multilevel preconditioner, or a Green's function evaluated with the
Fast Multipole Method (FMM). The methods utilizing the PDE formulation
described here differ from previously published approaches used in gravity
modeling in that they are optimal, implying that both the memory and
computational time required scale linearly with respect to the number of
unknowns in the potential field. Additionally, all of the implementations
presented here are developed such that the computations can be performed in a
massively parallel, distributed memory computing environment. Through numerical
experiments, we compare the methods on the basis of their discretization error,
CPU time and parallel scalability. We demonstrate the parallel scalability of
all these techniques by running forward models with up to 108 voxels on
1000's of cores.Comment: 38 pages, 13 figures; accepted by Geophysical Journal Internationa