GPUs Speed Reservoir Simulation with Cray CS-Storm Supercomputer

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permian_wells_thin_wells_nobkgdToday Cray announced the achievement of a new performance benchmark for reservoir simulations using Stone Ridge Technology’s ECHELON reservoir simulation software and the Cray CS-Storm cluster supercomputer.

With ECHELON and the Cray CS-Storm system, reservoir engineers now have the ability to run multiple realizations in a single day,” said Bert Beals, director for Cray’s Energy segment. “Performance requirements in the oil and gas industry, and particularly around reservoir simulation, are driven by demand for new oil fields and evaluation of existing fields for future investment. Speed, reliability and scalability are all important factors, and ECHELON running on our GPU-packed Cray CS-Storm system will provide oil and gas customers with a powerful solution for successfully evaluating the potential of both new and old reservoirs.”

The ECHELON software models oil, water and gas flows in a reservoir, and is specifically designed for leveraging GPU compute architectures. It has proven scalability across multiple GPUs, and by running on the Cray CS-Storm system, ECHELON can offer distinct benefits over other commercially available reservoir simulators. ECHELON and the Cray CS-Storm system can run high-resolution reservoir models more rapidly than any other commercially available system, and the joint solution is designed to deliver higher degrees of accuracy without compromising production schedules.

“Runtime performance is absolutely vital in the oil and gas industry, playing a critical role in reservoir simulation,” said Vincent Natoli, Founder/CEO, Stone Ridge Technology. “Cray offers the highest performing GPU-packed compute infrastructure on the market, and ECHELON running on its CS-Storm system delivers unprecedented speed that can be used by reservoir engineers to study many more realizations of their models and run large, high-resolution cases. We have demonstrated results on a 243 million-cell model running out 45 years on just two CS-Storm nodes completing in about two-and-a-half hours. The ability to do more in a smaller hardware footprint brings significant and welcome cost savings and productivity improvements at a very competitive time in the energy industry.”

cray-cs-storm-multi-cabinetThe Cray CS-Storm system enables highly scalable GPU computing for mission-critical applications in areas such as energy, manufacturing, earth sciences, life sciences, financial services, machine learning and geospatial intelligence. Each CS-Storm chassis combines eight NVIDIA Tesla K40 or K80 GPU accelerators with Intel Xeon processors. A single chassis equipped with Tesla K80s delivers 15 teraflops of peak performance, and a full petaflop requires just three racks.

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