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Simulation of high resolution reservoir models is useful to gain insight into oil and gas reservoirs. Nowadays, massive comprehensive reservoir simulation models can be built with detailed geological and well log data. These models require a very large high performance computing (HPC) platform for conducting reservoir simulation. Saudi Aramco has developed a state-of-the-art simulator, GigaPOWERS™, which is capable of simulating multibillion cell reservoir models. This paper provides an overview of challenges related to constructing, HPCs and visualizing the simulation output of giant reservoir models, and how the computational platform at Saudi Aramco is designed to overcome these challenges. A large HPC platform can be designed for reservoir simulation by connecting multiple Linux clusters in a simulation grid. Such an environment can provide the necessary capacity and computational power to solve multi-billion cell reservoir models. Such a simulation grid for reservoir simulation has been designed in the Saudi Aramco EXPEC Computer Center. In this study, we provide the benchmark results of multiple giant fields to evaluate the performance of the Saudi Aramco simulation grid for reservoir simulation. Communication and I/O routines in the simulator may add a considerable overhead in computation on such a computing platform. Connectivity between clusters on our simulation grid is tuned to maintain a high level of scalability in simulation. Excellent scalability results have been obtained for computations of giant simulation models on the simulation grid. Simulation models of the order of one billion cells pose a challenge to pre- and post-processing applications to load and process data in a reasonable time. Remote visualization, Level of Detail and Load on Demand algorithms were implemented in these applications and data formats were revised to efficiently process and visualize massive simulation models. |
