Development and application of a parallel compositional reservoir simulator

Simulation of large-scale and complex reservoirs requires fine and detailed gridding, which involves a significant amount of memory and is computationally expensive. Nowadays, clusters of PCs and high-performance computing (HPC) centers are widely available. These systems allow parallel processing, which helps large-scale simulations run faster and more efficient. In this research project, we developed a parallel version of The University of Texas Compositional Simulator (UTCOMP). The parallel UTCOMP is capable of running on both shared and distributed memory parallel computers. This parallelization included all physical features of the original code, such as higher-order finite difference, physical dispersion, and asphaltene precipitation. The parallelization was verified for several case studies using multiple processors. The parallel simulator produces outputs required for visualizing simulation results using the S3graph visualization software. The efficiency of the parallel simulator was assessed in terms of speedup using various numbers of processors. Subsequently, we improved the coding and implementation in the simulator in order to minimize the communications between the processors to improve the parallel efficiency to carry out the simulations. To improve the efficiency of the linear solver in the simulator, we implemented three well-known high-performance parallel solver packages (SAMG, Hypre, and PETSc) in the parallel simulator. Then, the performances of the solver packages were improved in terms of the input parameters for solving large-scale reservoir simulation problems. The developed parallel simulator has expanded the capability of the original code for simulating large-scale reservoir simulation case studies. In other words, with sufficient number of processors, a field-scale simulation with a million grid cells can be performed in few hours. Several case studies are presented to show the performance of the parallel simulator.