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'Do the math on that' High oil output isn't always the objective. Sometimes companies want to modulate output over time to allow for changes in markets and prices. Sometimes they want to find a design that comes with the lowest risk of failures or mishaps. Regardless of what result they are looking for, they want to identify that result in the shortest possible amount of time. Distributed computing is key. "We're supporting this now in a grid environment, modeling multiple configurations and multiple points concurrently," Kurc says. The team recently completed a set of about 25,000 runs--each taking about two hours on a single processor--in less than a week. "Do the math on that," Bangerth says. "You're talking 200 to 400 runs going at any one time…That's not something we're used to having." These calculations were completed using the TeraGrid cluster at NCSA. More runs are ongoing at NCSA and other TeraGrid sites across the country, including the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Machines at UT's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, host institution for the Center for Subsurface Modeling, are also in use. The TeraGrid is the world's largest, most comprehensive infrastructure for open scientific research. It includes 20 teraflops of computing power distributed at nine sites, facilities capable of managing and storing nearly one petabyte of data, high-resolution visualization environments, and toolkits for grid computing. NCSA's Bruce Loftis and Byoung-Do Kim helped port the reservoir simulation and optimization codes to the TeraGrid machines and built a toolkit that simplifies execution across multiple systems. The toolkit makes it easier for researchers to "babysit," as Kurc calls it, these large, distributed runs. It shows where calculations are taking place, which are complete, which have failed, and which are ongoing. That's no small feat when orchestrating work across hundreds of processors. "The TeraGrid is well suited to this project--massive numbers of independent jobs," Loftis explains. "There are lots of these sorts of problems out there."
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 Visualization of oil reservoir simulation. Pumps, represented by asterisks, push oil toward wells, represented by small white circles, that draw oil from the ground. Blue areas indicate areas of high water concentration. Brown areas indicate areas of high oil concentration. |
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