Principal Investigator John Williams
A typical multiphysics simulation takes direct input from a microCT scan, at a resolution of some 8 billion voxels of data. Each grain of rock has a different shape and may be cemented to other grains. Furthermore, the surface properties of the grains influence the wetability of the rock/fluid system. The gas, water and oil in the pores, and the rock matrix are then subject to driving forces, mainly mechanical but also seismic, chemical and electrical. We have developed new algorithms to take advantage of shared memory multicore computers. The challenge is to be fast but also to be “thread safe”. We have shown that by tuning the task size to the hardware we can solve problems that were impossible even a few years ago.