Next generation oil reservoir simulations

This paper describes a collaborative effort between Amoco Production Company, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Cray Research Inc. to develop a next-generation massively parallel oil reservoir simulation code. The simulator, code-named Falcon, enables highly detailed simulations to be performed on a range of platforms such as the Cray T3D and T3E. The code is currently being used by Amoco to perform a sophisticated field study using multiple geostatistical realizations on a scale of 2-5 million grid blocks and 1000-2000 wells. In this paper we discuss the nature of this collaborative effort, the software design and engineering aspects of the code, parallelization experiences, and performance studies. The code will be marketed to the oil industry by a third-party independent software vendor in mid-1996