Coupled Geomechanical and Reservoir Modeling on Parallel Computers

Abstract

Abstract In coupled geomechanics and reservoir modeling, the finite element discretization of the force balance equation leads to very large linear systems, whose solution is both time and memory consuming. ICCG (Incomplete Cholesky Factorized Conjugate Gradient) is a popular technique for solving for displacements, but the technique is limited to about 60,000 nodal points on desktop machines. Most large 3D field scale problems will have to be run on parallel machines. In this paper, we present a reduced-communication, super coarsening multigrid method that can be combined with other domain decomposition-based preconditioner to achieve faster convergence with high parallel scalability. A preliminary test case of 1.5 million grid blocks with up to 59 processors shows a parallel efficiency of above 90%.