Compositional Reservoir Simulation on CM-5 and KSR-1 Parallel Machines

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recently, use of parallel machines in reservoir simulation has received considerable attention from the petroleum industry. This paper presents parallelization of a 3D compositional, equation-of-state reservoir simulator on the CM-5 and KSR-1. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the parallelization of a compositional reservoir simulator has been performed on both the CM-5 and KSR-1. For new users of the CM-5 machines, the software and hardware of CM-5 architecture is presented, as well as details of the parallelization techniques. For example, domain decomposition, I/O's, phase equilibrium computations, and well model are described. The parallelism techniques on the KSR-1 are presented with the emphasis on the porting of the phase equilibrium calculation. The performance of each machine is evaluated by showing the speedup on different sets of processing nodes. Two test problems were used to explore the capability of the parallelized version of the code; one is a waterflood problem and the other is a CO2 multiple contact miscible flood, both in a West Texas oil field. These field problems were run on 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 processors to get insight into the locations of communication bottlenecks, generally occurring in the programming with distributed memory machines. The problems of latency and bandwidth which are associated with communication efficiency of the CM-5 are also addressed.