Abstract: Use of MASTER Web to Improve History Matching

CHANG, SHIH-HSIEN, New Mexico Petr. Recovery Ctr., TX

A long-standing problem in reservoir simulation is history matching. Although automatic history matching is a difficult process due to the high number of variables and degree of uncertainties, it is possible to develop methodologies to improve the matching process.This paper presents MASTER Web, a software tool for configuring a web-based parallel processing system on cluster of PCs to support a new approach for history matching. A simple, Java-based software has been implemented to connect/communicate heterogeneous (different hardware and OS) PCs for carrying out the simulation. MASTER Web, a loosely coupled (with no shared memory) parallel system configured in a master-slaves fashion, is sufficient for history matching since there is no need for inter-slave-processor communication. Utilizing parallel simulation across the Internet (the Web), this novel technique not only aims to solve history matching, but solves it economically on cluster of ordinary PCs, thus making it affordable for smaller oil companies. There is a great number of applications of this technique in reservoir simulation. Every application that requires several simulation runs can be improved with MASTER Web. The preliminary results that have been obtained are highly encouraging and indicate the great potential of our approach. Our experiments, carried out with only small cluster of PCs, have achieved a significant practical speedup (i.e., in terms of wall clock time).

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90911©2000 AAPG Pacific Section and Western Region Society of Petroleum Engineers, Long Beach, California