Sparse Gaussian Elimination for Complex Reservoir Models.

The simulation industry is rapidly moving towards the frequent use of complex reservoir models including such features as faults, implicit well terms, and thermal or compositional effects. All of these things can pose great difficulties for the standard direct elimination methods typically found in reservoir simulators. This paper takes a new look at sparse Gaussian elimination methods in the context of the current technology and trends in simulation and computing. A novel implementation is described, and numerical results are presented that indicate that this implementation can be a more effective tool for simulation than previous versions of sparse elimination.