Stone Ridge Technology

Our Partners

AEM Enersol partners with Stone Ridge Technology to market ECHELON, high performance petroleum reservoir simulator to the industry.

Stone Ridge Technology has expertise in developing, porting and optimizing scalable physics and engineering based technical codes on modern multi-core and GPU compute architectures.

Stone Ridge Technology markets ECHELON, the fastest commercial simulator in the world typically 10x to 50x faster than legacy codes. It can run large geo-scale models in the 100’s of millions of cells and it runs on compact commodity server and GPU hardware.

Product & Services

Echelon

ECHELON is the fastest reservoir simulator in the world, vastly outpacing legacy simulators and many times faster than other modern CPU based codes while also retaining the precise accuracy you expect from legacy simulators. Faster simulation enables reservoir engineers to use statistical ensemble methodologies for history matching and multi-realization workflows yielding more accurate and more predictive results.

ECHELON is a massively parallel, fully-implicit, extended black-oil reservoir simulator built from inception to take full advantage of the fine-grained parallelism and massive compute capability offered by modern Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). These GPUs provide a dense computing platform with ultrahigh memory bandwidth and extreme arithmetic throughput. Massively parallel GPU hardware, modern solver algorithms and careful implementation are combined in ECHELON to enable efficient simulation from hundreds of thousands to billions of cells. This is accomplished at speeds that enable the practical simulation of hundreds of realizations of large complex models in vastly less time, all while using far fewer hardware resources than CPU based solutions. The principle conclusion we draw from our results is that ECHELON used an order of magnitude fewer server nodes and two orders of magnitude fewer domains to achieve an order of magnitude greater calculation speed than those reported by analogous CPU based codes.

Case Studies

Permian Basin

ECHELON’s accuracy and speed play a critical role in the characterization of the Permian Basin unconventional reservoir which located in West Texas and Southeast New Mexico. To more accurately predict the performance of the reservoir, engineers at iReservoir needed to determine the sensitivity of the model results to a large number of parameters. These sensitivities were calculated by executing numerical simulations on a large ensemble of model realizations, each with millions to tens of millions of active grid cells. Such multiple realization studies using existing simulators are severely restricted by both software and hardware limitations, take days to weeks to run and require substantial hardware resources.

ECHELON is a massively parallel, fully-implicit, extended black-oil reservoir simulator built from the ground-up for exceptional speed. GPU hardware, modern solver algorithms and careful implementation are combined in ECHELON to allow the simulation of hundreds to thousands of realizations of large complex models in vastly less time than legacy solutions while using fewer hardware resources.

SPE10

ECHELON solves benchmark SPE10 model in record 23 seconds. The principle goal of the 10th SPE Comparative Solution Project is to compare upgridding approaches on a one million cell model. The model geometry is a regular Cartesian grid with 60 x 220 x 85 (1,122,000) cells. The model is characterized by two formations, the first in the top 35 layers and the second in the bottom 50 layers. Both formations display large permeability variations that range up to 12 orders of magnitude. The reservoir is produced by a five-spot pattern with a water drive in the center at a constant constant injection rate of 5,000 stb/d and production wells in each of the four corners, with bottom-hole pressures of 4,000 psi. The simulation produces for 2,000 days assuming incompressible flow.

SPE10 is a particular challenge for many simulators because of its strong heterogeneous variations in permeability. A legacy code running on 16 CPU cores takes 72 hours. ECHELON employs an Algebraic Multigrid (AMG) solver, the most modern, scalable algorithmic approach to this problem. ECHELON’s AMG solver is implemented in GPU for exceptional speed. Using just 2 NVIDIA V100 GPUs ECHLEON solves the full SPE10 problem in 18 seconds.

Billion Cell

ECHELON enables the modelling and simulation of giant conventional reservoirs. ECHELON is a massively parallel, fully-implicit, extended black-oil reservoir simulator built from inception to take full advantage of the fine-grained parallelism and massive compute capability offered by modern Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). These GPUs provide a dense computing platform with ultrahigh memory bandwidth and extreme arithmetic throughput. Massively parallel GPU hardware, modern solver algorithms and careful implementation are combined in ECHELON to enable efficient simulation from hundreds of thousands to billions of cells. This is accomplished at speeds that enable the practical simulation of hundreds of realizations of large complex models in vastly less time, all while using far fewer hardware resources than CPU based solutions. The principle conclusion we draw from our results is that ECHELON used an order of magnitude fewer server nodes and two orders of magnitude fewer domains to achieve an order of magnitude greater calculation speed than those reported by analo-gous CPU based codes.

Publications

K. Esler et al., “GPU Acceleration of Equation of State Calculations in Compositional Reservoir Simulation”, The European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (2016) ECMOR XIV – 15th European Conference on the Mathematics of Oil Recovery, Mo Efe 10
M. Shahvali, et al., “Unconventional Reservoir Model Predictions Using Massively-Parallel Flow-Simulation: Bakken/Three Forks Reservoir Development Cases and SRV Testing”, Society of Petroleum Engineers (2016) SPE Low Perm Symposium. SPE-180204-MS.
C. Casciano, et al., “Latest Advances in Simulation Technology for High-resolution Reservoir Models: Achievements and Opportunities for Improvement”, Society of Petroleum Engineers (2015) SPE Reservoir Characterisation and Simulation Conference and Exhibition. SPE-175633-MS
J. R. Gilman, et al., “Unconventional Reservoir Model Predictions Using Massively-‐Parallel GPU Flow-‐Simulation: Part-‐1 Bakken Reservoir Characterization Choices and Parameter Testing”, SPE-‐AAPG-‐SEG Unconven.tional Resources Technology Conference (2015). URTeC 2153938
K. Mukundakrishnan, et al., “Accelerating Tight Reservoir Workflows With GPUs“, Society of Petroleum Engineers (2015). SPE 173246
J. Shumway, et al., “Rapid High-‐Fidelity Reservoir Simulation with Fine-‐Grained Parallelism on Multiple GPUs“, EAGE Workshop on High Performance Computing for Upstream, Greece, (2014).
J. Shumway, et al., “Rapid High-Fidelity Reservoir Simulation with Fine-Grained Parallelism on Multiple GPUs”, The European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (2014) EAGE Workshop on High Performance Computing for Upstream.
K. Esler, et al., “Realizing the Potential of GPUs for Reservoir Simulation“, ECMOR XIV – 14th European Conference on the Mathematics of Oil Recovery Catania, Sicily, Italy, (2014).
K. Esler, et al., “Parallel Efficiency and Algorithmic Optimality in Reservoir Simulation on GPUs”, Society of Petroleum Engineers (2014) SPE Large Scale Computing and Big Data Challenges in Reservoir Simulation Conference and Exhibition. SPE-14MMFD-34
K. Esler et al., “Realizing the Potential of GPUs for Reservoir Simulation”, The European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (2014) ECMOR XIV – 14th European Conference on the Mathematics of Oil Recovery,
K. Esler, et al., “Accelerating Reservoir Simulation with GPUs”, The European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (2011) 73rd EAGE Conference & Exhibition incorporating SPE EUROPEC 2011. D036