Challenges in High Performance Computing for Reservoir Simulation

Abstract

High resolution reservoir modeling is necessary to analyze complex flow phenomena in reservoirs. As more powerful computing platforms become available, reservoir simulation engineers are building larger and higher resolution reservoir models to study giant fields. Large number of simulations is necessary to validate the model and to lower uncertainty in prediction results. It is a challenge to accurately model complex processes in the reservoir and also efficiently solve high resolution giant reservoir models on rapidly evolving hardware and software platforms. There are many challenges to get high performance in reservoir simulations on constantly evolving computing platforms. There are constraints which limit performance of large scale reservoir simulation. In this study, we review some of these constraints and show their effects on practical reservoir simulation. We review emerging computing platforms and highlight opportunities and challenges for reservoir simulation on those platforms. It is anticipated that management of data locality by the simulator will become very important on emerging computing platforms and there will be needs to manage locality to achieve good performance. Heterogeneity in the computing platform will make it difficult to get good performance without adoption of a hybrid parallelization style in the simulator. In this study, we analyze many benchmark results to illustrate challenges in high performance computations of reservoir simulation on current and emerging computing platforms.

Parallel Multi-Stage Preconditioners with Adaptive Setup for the Black Oil Model

“…As multi-core and many-core architectures become more and more popular, parallel computing for petroleum reservoir simulation is now a subject of great interest. In recent years, there has been some work on parallel algorithms for reservoir problems; see [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45] and references therein. For example, Feng et al [35] designed an OpenMP parallel algorithm with high efficiency and low memory cost for standard interpolation and coarse grid operator of AMG, under the framework of Fast Auxiliary Space Preconditioning (FASP) [46].…”

Perturbation Theory and Phase Behavior Calculations Using Equation of State Models

“…Finally, efforts have been concentrated on utilizing advanced code optimization [38] and High Performance Computing (HPC) techniques which take advantage of the parallel computing capabilities of modern computer architectures [39]. Despite the difficulties in distributing the work load and in optimizing memory transfer between clusters, impressive acceleration factors have been reported [40].…”

On Robust and Efficient Parallel Reservoir Simulation on Tianhe-2

“…The largest reservoir model simulated has over 2 billion cells based on a compositional n-porosity formulation . A review of parallel reservoir simulation can be found in Hayder and Baddourah (2012).…”