Reservoir Simulation (A3)
Project PI: Kami Sepehrnoori
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Accurate and efficient reservoir simulation is of critical importance to the economic well-being of the United States. Future oil and gas production in this country is dependent upon enhanced oil recovery, reservoir stimulation and reservoir characterization technologies. Intense computer simulation is essential for effective reservoir management. Parallel reservoir simulators have the potential to solve larger, more realistic problems than previously possible. In a funded U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Computational Technology (ACTI) grant entitled "Research in New Generation Framework for Petroleum Reservoir Simulation," a new-generation code that is designed to perform accurate, efficient high-resolution simulation of flow in permeable media for large and more complex problems is being developed and with more accurate solutions and faster simulations than now feasible. The research program involves development of new physical and chemical models, accurate numerical methods, and new reservoir description techniques implemented in a parallel environment. The research project will involve investigation of the new codes in the Intel cluster environment and assessing the feasibility of using such a model for large-scale reservoir simulations.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES
The first objective of this project is to port a compositional reservoir simulator called UTCHEM to distributed memory cluster of Intel processors. The UTCHEM simulator is a general-purpose chemical flooding simulator that models the transport of chemical species in three-dimensional, multiphase flow through permeable media. By performing this task, the feasibility of using the cluster of Intel processors for solving large-scale enhanced oil recovery simulations in conjunction with the UTCHEM simulator can be assessed.
IMPACT
The proposed research will have a high impact because the Reservoir Simulation research group interact closely with the petroleum industry and this will provide an opportunity to demonstrate the new high end Intel products on reservoir simulation problems.
EQUIPMENT
To support the proposed activities within the existing framework at UT, the following cluster configurations (loose and tight clusters) with supporting networking hardware are proposed. For fast communications between computers the 100 Mbit/s Fast Ethernet on each of the machines will be used. These computers will be connected in a hypercube fashion. Year 1 - 16 Uniprocessors; 1 Dual Processors with graphics; 2 Monitors; Year 2 - 1 Dual Processors with graphics; 7 Dual Processors; Year 3 - 3 Uniprocessors; 1 Dual Processor.
RESOURCES
The Petroleum Engineering Department will provide laboratory space and research faculty, post-doctoral fellow and graduate student support for the application studies. Our research on UTCHEM is carried out in partnership with the following companies: BP Exploration, Inc., Chevron Petroleum Technology Co., Conoco, Inc., Cray Research, Inc., IBM Corp., Landmark, Mobil E&P Technical Center, Schlumberger GeoQuest, Scientific Software Intercomp, Inc., Texaco, and UNOCAL Corp.
BENEFITS TO INTEL
Petroleum reservoir simulation studies are computationally intensive. It is not unusual to consume hours of CPU time on a super computer (i.e., CRAY C90) to complete an enhanced oil recovery simulation run. The oil industry is quite interested in learning how parallel processing will play a role in reservoir simulation. Successful completion of this project should place the Intel processors among the ones that the oil industry would consider for their usage in the area of distributed memory parallel computing.