Operator-based Linearization: Flexible Strategy for Development of New Simulator

I will talk about recently proposed Operator-Based Linearization (OBL) approach used to develop a general purpose reservoir simulation code aiming to substantially decrease the simulation time. OBL offers a simplified linearization method, enhancing the computational performance of simulation and providing an opportunity of a painless porting to heterogeneous computing architectures. To distinct the contribution to simulation performance of both factors, we developed two versions of the compositional simulation prototype code within a month: for traditional CPU and GPU-accelerated hardware architectures. While the former allowed us to speed the linearization stage up by an order of magnitude in comparison with the conventional approach, based on Automatic Differentiation (AD), the latter improved it further by another order of magnitude. The developed prototype realizes the potential of the OBL approach and GPU computing architecture, proving significant improvement in general purpose simulation performance.