In 1989 it has been reported how an operational black/volatile oil reservoir simulator of IMPEC type has been successfully parallelised for a medium-scale (10-100 processors) local memory MIMD
architecture1. The present paper reviews the principles underlying the parallelisation and describes the further development of the parallel simulator. Some attention is given to the linear solver which is of conjugate gradient type, with a local, block-wise preconditioner. A novel acceleration method, CGSTAB, for the solution of non-symmetric linear systems is described.
The parallel simulator is now being evaluated in an operational environment. It has been installed on a 90 processor, 5500,000 Meiko M40 that should support two simultaneous job streams, each running at one quarter to one half (depending on the input) of the speed of a 1 processor Cray-XMP.
So, at present, parallel computing leads to a substantial reduction of computing cost. In the very near future however, parallel computing machinery of the same family but based on the latest hardware, will beat traditional sequential computers on absolute performance too.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.