Toward Cost-Effective Reservoir Simulation Solvers on GPUs

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on graphical processing unit (GPU) and discuss how its architecture affects the choice of algorithm and implementation of fully-implicit petroleum reservoir simulation. In order to obtain satisfactory performance on new many-core architectures such as GPUs, the simulator developers must know a great deal on the specific hardware and spend a lot of time on fine tuning the code. Porting a large petroleum reservoir simulator to emerging hardware architectures is expensive and risky. We analyze major components of an in-house reservoir simulator and investigate how to port them to GPUs in a cost-effective way. Preliminary numerical experiments show that our GPU-based simulator is robust and effective. More importantly, these numerical results clearly identify the main bottlenecks to obtain ideal speedup on GPUs and possibly other many-core architectures.