Large Scale Parallel Reservoir Simulations on a Linux PC-Cluster 1
W. A. Habiballah, M. Ehtesham Hayder · 2003
Numerical reservoir simulation is an important tool used by engineers to develop producing strategies for oil and gas fields and to understand fluid flow behavior in subsurface reservoirs. Demand for mega scale reservoir simulations is increasing, particularly in large fields common in Saudi Arabia. These mega cell simulations are expensive on traditional supercomputers. PC cluster technology is ra pidly evolving and promises to be a low cost alternative to traditional supercomputers. In this work, we investigated the use of state of the art PC cluster s in simulation of massive reservoir models. Ou r investigation indicates that large scale reservoir simulations can be performed efficiently and cost effectively on latest PC clusters. In this paper, we discuss some of our findings and issues related to parallel reservoir simulations on PC clusters. We also present performance comparison among Xeon Linux PC clusters and an IBM SP Nighthawk supercomputer.