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Digital
Library of the European Council for Modelling and Simulation |
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Title: |
Building an open-source community for subsurface flow simulation |
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Authors: |
Knut-Andreas Lie |
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Published in:
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(2022). ECMS 2022,
36th Proceedings DOI: http://doi.org/10.7148/2022 ISSN:
2522-2422 (ONLINE) ISSN:
2522-2414 (PRINT) ISSN:
2522-2430 (CD-ROM) ISBN: 978-3-937436-77-7 Communications of the ECMS , Volume 36, Issue 1, June 2022, Ålesund, Norway May 30th - June 3rd, 2022 |
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Citation
format: |
Knut-Andreas Lie (2022). Building an open-source community for subsurface flow simulation, ECMS 2022 Proceedings Edited By: Ibrahim A. Hameed, Agus Hasan, Saleh Abdel-Afou Alaliyat, European Council for Modeling and Simulation. doi:10.7148/2022-0009 |
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DOI: |
https://doi.org/10.7148/2022-0009 |
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Abstract: |
The MATLAB Reservoir Simulation
Toolbox (MRST) is a unique research tool for rapid prototyping and
demonstration of new computational methods for flow in porous media. The
software has a large user base all over the world in both academia and
industry. My group is also one of the key contributors to OPM Flow, the
world's first open-source reservoir simulator aimed at full industry use. In
addition, we are currently developing Jutul, an upcoming Julia code for
high-performance demonstrators of subsurface flow. In the talk, I will briefly
describe the MRST and OPM Flow platforms, how they came to be, compare and
contrast their development and ownership models, and outline some of the
factors that have contributed to their current success. MRST was originally an internal
research tool that has, over the last ten years, morphed into the de-facto
standard tool for researchers who want to learn about subsurface flow, and
obtain a head start for their own research prototypes. MRST is organized as a
minimal core module offering basic data structures and functionality for
representing grids and physical parameters relevant to porous media flow, and
a large set of add-on modules offering discretizations, solvers, physical
models, and a wide variety of simulators and workflow tools. In the modules,
you will find many tutorial examples that explain and showcase how MRST can be
used to make general or fit-for-purpose simulators and workflow tools.
The modular structure makes it easy to add new or modify existing
functionality, and many of the 60 currently released modules are authored
entirely or in part at other institutions. The software is licensed under the
viral GPL license, with copyright of the core parts vested at SINTEF, where we
heavily rely on the code for both our contract work and academic research. The
software exists as an add-on to the commercial MATLAB product, which greatly
simplifies the process of getting started, but also poses certain restrictions
on usage and performance potential. (Except for graphical interfaces, large
parts of MRST also work well with GNU Octave.) OPM Flow aims to simulate many
of the same physical processes as MRST, but its disruptive power comes from
being a drop-in replacement for commercial reservoir simulators that have been
developed and validated over decades. Such simulators, which are used for
development planning and day to day operations of oil and gas fields and CO2
storage operations, are highly complex, expensive and difficult to modify as
the source codes are not available. OPM Flow is a collaborative effort,
developed in collaboration with Equinor, NORCE, and others, to provide an
open-source alternative that enables more open innovation. The simulator is
written in high-performance C++ and is released under the GPL license. A key
requirement for the development has been that the new simulator should
reproduce virtually identical simulation results as contemporary commercial
tools both in hindcasting decades of production histories and in forecasting
future production. Achieving this has been a vast undertaking filled with
stumbling blocks and a lot of reverse engineering.
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