Parallelization and Performance Analysis of an IMPES-based Oil-Water Reservoir Simulator

Abstract

Oil reservoir simulation helps in extracting oil and in optimal well placement. This paper presents the parallelization, development, performance analysis, and profiling of a 2-phase oil-water reservoir simulator on a heterogeneous multi-core STI Cell computer. Despite the largely interdependent nature of the oil reservoir model equations, we obtained speedups of 6x with a 1D reservoir data. We boosted the performance by 2x with the right selection of compiler options. We also ran our application on the SystemSim simulator for collection of performance events. Profiling and trace analysis of the application were conducted through VAMPIR, a performance and trace analysis tool for HPC applications. The results from both tools are also presented.

Parallelization and performance comparison of the conjugate gradient equation solver on multicore Cell and Xeon computers

“…In prior work , the Thomas algorithm was used to find an exact solution of the pressure and saturation variables at each grid point of a two‐phase oil/water reservoir. For small grid sizes (32‐128), speedups ranging between two and six were recorded on one Cell BE processor with four and eight SPEs enabled versus the PPE‐only (serial, RISC) implementation.…”