Development of a parallel chemical flooding reservoir simulator

Abstract

Simulation of large-scale and complicated reservoirs requires a large number of gridblocks, which consumes a considerable amount of memory and is computationally expensive. One solution to remedy the computational problem is to take advantage of clusters of CPUs and high-performance computing widely available nowadays. We can run large-scale simulations faster and more efficiently by using parallel processing on these clusters. In this study, we developed a parallel version of an in-house comprehensive chemical flooding reservoir simulator called UTCHEM using MPI functions. Several case studies were used to validate the simulator. The speedup results also show very good parallel efficiency. To the best of our knowledge this is the first time that such a comprehensive chemical reservoir simulator is parallelised, which can be effective in running large-scale cases involving various type of chemical EOR processes, with millions of gridblocks, in few hours. [Received: November 25, 2015; Accepted: June 18, 2016]