A Parallel Load-Balancing Reservoir Simulator with Dynamic Mesh Optimisation

Abstract

The use of dynamic mesh optimization (DMO) for multiphase flow in porous have been proposed recently showing a very good potential to reduce the computational cost by placing the resolution where and when necessary. Nonetheless, further work needs to be done to prove its usability in very large domains where parallel computing with distributed memory, i.e. using MPI libraries, may be necessary. Here, we describe the methodology used to parallelize a multiphase porous media flow simulator in combination with DMO as well as study of its performance. Due to the peculiarities and complexities of the typical porous media simulations due to its high aspect ratios, we have included a fail-safe for parallel simulations with DMO that enhance the robustness and stability of the methods used to parallelize DMO in other fields (Navier- Stokes flows). The results show that DMO for parallel computing in multiphase porous media flows can perform very well, showing good scaling behaviour.

Reactive transport modeling in heterogeneous porous media with dynamic mesh optimization

“…code. Parallelisation of the procedure is also trivial as again, only IC-FERST requires information of neighbouring elements/CVs and we expect to have the same performance with IC-FERST-REACT than that obtained by IC-FERST in parallel [38]. The presented work here is the first step to show that reaction with DMO and surface based modelling is not only feasible but also very efficient.…”

“…IC-FERST is publicly available under the terms of the Affero General-Purpose License (AGPL). IC-FERST has been fully parallelized with MPI [38]. It has been tested on the U.K. national supercomputer Archer.…”

Dynamic mesh optimisation for geothermal reservoir modelling

“…where s c is a possible source term. Numerical solution of equations ( 1) and ( 2) using IC-FERST, along with implementation in parallel using dynamic domain decomposition on distributed memory systems (MPI), has been described elsewhere (Gomes et al, 2017;Salinas et al, 2019) so is not included here; rather, we focus on solution of the thermal problem which is new for this paper.…”

“…Both domains are discretised on the same mesh. The method is therefore based on a conforming mesh approach which allows re-use of the existing domain decomposition method for parallel computing, as well as ensuring consistency when using DMO (Salinas et al, 2019). The main drawback is that the wells domain is almost empty, since wells are 1D lines in a 3D domain.…”