  This article introduces a benchmark application for seismic modeling using
finite difference method, which is namedMiniMod, a mini application for seismic
modeling. The purpose is to provide a benchmark suite that is, on one hand easy
to build and adapt to the state of the art in programming models and changing
high performance hardware landscape. On the other hand, the intention is to
have a proxy application to actual production geophysical exploration workloads
for Oil & Gas exploration, and other geosciences applications based on the wave
equation. From top to bottom, we describe the design concepts, algorithms, code
structure of the application, and present the benchmark results on different
current computer architectures.
