  The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is leading to a new
generation of hardware accelerators optimized for deep learning. Some of the
designs of these accelerators are general enough to allow their use for other
computationally intensive tasks beyond AI. Cloud tensor processing units (TPUs)
are one such example. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach using TensorFlow on
Cloud TPUs to implement a high-resolution imaging technique called
full-waveform inversion. Higher-order numerical stencils leverage the efficient
matrix multiplication offered by the Cloud TPU, and the halo exchange benefits
from the dedicated high-speed interchip connection. The performance is
competitive when compared with Tesla V100 graphics processing units and shows
promise for future computation- and memory-intensive imaging applications.
