On the impact of heterogeneity-aware mesh partitioning and non-contributing computation removal on parallel reservoir simulations

Abstract

Parallel computations have become standard practice for simulating the complicated multi-phase flow in a petroleum reservoir. Increasingly sophisticated numerical techniques have been developed in this context. During the chase of algorithmic superiority, however, there is a risk of forgetting the ultimate goal, namely, to efficiently simulate real-world reservoirs on realistic parallel hardware platforms. In this paper, we quantitatively analyse the negative performance impact caused by non-contributing computations that are associated with the “ghost computational cells” per subdomain, which is an insufficiently studied subject in parallel reservoir simulation. We also show how these non-contributing computations can be avoided by reordering the computational cells of each subdomain, such that the ghost cells are grouped together. Moreover, we propose a new graph-edge weighting scheme that can improve the mesh partitioning quality, aiming at a balance between handling the heterogeneity of geological properties and restricting the communication overhead. To put the study in a realistic setting, we enhance the open-source Flow simulator from the OPM framework, and provide comparisons with industrial-standard simulators for real-world reservoir models.