Performance evaluation of a reservoir simulator on a multi-core cluster

Reservoir simulators are one of the most important tools on reservoir engineering since they allow the prediction of real reservoir’s behavior. However, in order to deal with medium and large scale problems it is necessary to use parallel computing. This work presents the development of a reservoir simulator, based on a two-phase flow model of porous media, and its parallelization. The implementation of the simulator was based on an IMPES scheme and the PETSc library, which uses MPI for data communication between processes, was employed to solve the system of equations. The performance analysis was made in a parallel environment composed by a cluster of multiprocessor computers and the results suggest that the performance of parallel applications strongly depends on the memory contention in multiprocessor computers, such as the quad-cores. Thus, parallel computing should follow certain restrictions regarding the use and mapping of tasks to compute cores.