CHALLENGEClients need higher precision results faster - forcing a huge

increase in the number of compute cores used per simulation

PROBLEMHigh core counts bring more

complex performance bottlenecks and bugs - that conventional

methods cannot solve quickly SOLUTION

Allinea Forge - the toolsuite for high performance and parallel software

developers RESULTS

Faster simulations for clients, faster resolution of problems - and more

time to develop software

Speed and quality are critical to reservoir simulation software and to the development teams behind it. Allinea Forge had immediate impact on Roxar Software Solutions in the race for higher resolution.

Reservoir engineers within the oil and gas industry face increasing pressure to develop new fields and ensure that recovery from existing reservoirs is maximized to its full potential. Those challenges are met head-on through modeling and simulation software.

Software solutions can aid reservoir engineers with everything from the optimization of hydrocarbon production to the accurate estimation of reserves, and, most importantly, can ensure that optimal decisions are made over the entire reservoir lifecycle.

The value of accurate simulation to the industry cannot be understated, as small errors have significant financial and environmental repercussions.

One such solution is Roxar Tempest MORE, a high-resolution and high-performance full field black oil, compositional and thermal reservoir simulator developed by Roxar Software Solutions at Emerson Process Management. One of five modules within Roxar’s reservoir engineering toolbox, Roxar Tempest MORE simulates the flow of hydrocarbons underground and along the wells in order to aid engineers in

CASE STUDY Faster reservoir simulation and higher throughput for Emerson Roxar clients

creating and implementing the best development strategy.

COMPLEX CHALLENGES WITH A NEED FOR SPEED

Michele Taroni, Principal Software Developer for the Roxar Software Suite, explained that the key requirement of operators is throughput, and that while models of full reservoirs used to have only a few thousand grid blocks, simulations are considerably larger today.

‘Whereas models could previously be run on a desktop computer using just a single CPU, there has been mounting pressure to add resolution,’ he explained. ‘As a result of that, models have increased in size from a few thousand cells to the point where it’s now common to use millions of grid blocks, if not more.’ In order to not only generate these large models, but to simulate what could be up to 50 or 60 years of production in a practical time, the models need to be run on more computational cores.

This adds its own complications and the challenges facing developers are two-fold, as highlighted by Taroni. ‘The

first challenge is performance,’ he said. ‘Essentially you’re taking the code and attempting to run it in parallel on many computational cores so any part that can’t be run in parallel will act as a bottleneck and affect performance.

‘The second challenge when writing parallel code such as this is the debugging,’ continued Taroni. ‘As your code gets increasingly complex and is running over many cores, it becomes trickier to debug, which in turn really slows down our development.’

FASTER DEVELOPMENT, HIGHER QUALITY CODE

Quality and performance are critical to the development process and to ensure that Roxar had both, the company invested in Allinea Forge, a complete tool suite for software development. Containing the industry leading debugger Allinea DDT, and profiler Allinea MAP, it has had a significant impact on Roxar. ‘Allinea DDT has helped us to find parallel bugs that have been reported by clients, as well as guiding us to discover ones prior to shipping,’ commented Taroni. ‘During the development process, our developers can debug the code in parallel and find problems quickly and easily, which then gives us more time to focus on creating software features instead.’

He continued: ‘Before Allinea DDT, we were relying on finely chopping our way through the code to work

out how and why something might have happened. But with a powerful debugger we can pinpoint a typical bug in parallel much faster. Moreover, by having a good tool during the development process, and being able to develop using that tool from the start, we reduce the number of bugs going into the code as well as the amount of testing and bugs to come out of it.’

According to Taroni, the real differentiator that makes Allinea DDT stand out in the market is the extra dimension it offers in parallel. ‘Within one minute of starting the tool, the other developers and I were all running our program, going through the code and instantly getting a view of what was going on. The setup is incredibly easy and the tool has a very intuitive interface,’ he said. ‘Allinea DDT has a nice look and feel about it and you don’t need any training to get started – it’s just as you would expect it to be. Using Allinea DDT has many short and long-term benefits.’

ASSURING PERFORMANCE

Allinea MAP has found an unexpected niche performance testing role as Taroni explained: ‘Whenever we add in a major new feature and want to check that the program is still performing well, we’ll test it by using Allinea MAP. On a couple of occasions we’ve made a change to the code and discovered a slowdown that shouldn’t have

happened, but by using Allinea MAP and analyzing the code before and after the change, we were quickly able to identify the problem and fix it.’

REMOVING BOTTLENECKS - INCREASING SPEED BY 30%

Allinea MAP is aiding with scalability by profiling and highlighting bottlenecks. One example came when a slowdown was reported on a later version of Roxar Tempest MORE compared to previous releases. By utilizing Allinea MAP, Taroni’s team were able to locate the problem, fix it and prevent another bottleneck from occurring. ‘As a result, that client model is now running 30 per cent faster,’ said Taroni, adding that unlike some other MPI profiling tools, running Allinea does not slow down the code and its performance does not degrade as you increase the number of processors.

‘There was an immediate impact on our performance and it therefore allowed our clients to run their models much faster,’ he continued. ‘This is incredibly important because the majority of our clients don’t tend to run just one single realization of a model; they run many realizations of them. If we accelerate the speed of those models, the oil and gas company can increase their entire reservoir engineering throughput. In this industry, that’s critical.’

“Allinea Forge had an immediate impact on the performance of our code. In one case, we not only removed a slowdown, but we were able to identify and prevent a bottleneck from happening. The model is now running 30% faster than it was before.”

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