Parallelization and Performance Analysis of an IMPES-based Oil-Water Reservoir Simulator

Oil reservoir simulation helps in extracting oil and in optimal well placement. This paper presents the parallelization, development, performance analysis, and profiling of a 2-phase oil-water reservoir simulator on a heterogeneous multi-core STI Cell computer. Despite the largely interdependent nature of the oil reservoir model equations, we obtained speedups of 6x with a 1D reservoir data. We boosted the performance by 2x with the right selection of compiler options. We also ran our application on the SystemSim simulator for collection of performance events. Profiling and trace analysis of the application were conducted through VAMPIR, a performance and trace analysis tool for HPC applications. The results from both tools are also presented.