ABSTRACT
Recent decisions by several of the major oil companies to acquire vector processing computers indicate the growing acceptance of these machines in exploration and production applications. While seismic processing has probably provided the primary justification for these acquisitions, suitability for numerical reservoir simulation should be considered in evaluating such hardware.
This paper extends the results presented in a previous paper by comparing the performance of the CYBER 203, CYBER 205, and CRAY-1 S computers when running a three-dimensional, three-phase reservoir simulator.(1) Each of three different problems were run on the 203 and 205, and all three machines were used to solve one problem.
As might be expected, the results show that the improvement obtained from one computer to the next is somewhat problem dependent. The parameters affecting the differences include the vector length and the amount of scalar code executed relative to vector code. In the three cases, the CYBER 205 demonstrated run times of 2.3 to 3.4 times faster than the CYBER 203. The CYBER 205 was found to be 1.6 times faster than the CRAY-1 S in the case where all three machines were tested.