ANSYS, Saudi Aramco, KAUST Shatter Supercomputing Record

This supercomputing record represents a more than five-times increase over the record set three years ago, when Fluent first reached the 36,000-core scaling milestone, according to the groups.

The calculations were run on the Shaheen II, a Cray XC40 supercomputer, hosted at the KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab (KSL). By leveraging high performance computing (HPC), ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and KSL sped up a complex simulation of a separation vessel from several weeks to an overnight run. Saudi Aramco reportedly will apply this technology to make more-informed, timely decisions to retrofit separation vessels to optimize operation throughout an oil field’s lifetime.

“...designers and engineers must understand product performance with higher accuracy than ever before – especially for separation technologies, where an improved separation performance can immediately increase the efficiency and profitability of an oil field. The supercomputing collaboration between ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and KSL enabled enhanced insight in complex gas, water and crude-oil flows inside a separation vessel, which include liquid free-surface, phase mixing and droplets settling phenomena,” says Wim Slagter, director of HPC and cloud alliances at ANSYS.

“Our oil and gas facilities are among the largest in the world. We selected a complex representative application – a multiphase gravity separation vessel – to confirm the value of HPC in reducing turnover time, which is critical to our industry,” says Ehab Elsaadawy, computational modeling specialist and oil treatment team leader at Saudi Aramco’s Research and Development Center. “By working with strategic partner, KAUST, we can now run these complex simulations in one day instead of weeks.”

KSL’s Shaheen II supercomputer is a Cray system composed of 6,174 nodes representing 197,568 processor cores tightly integrated with a richly layered memory hierarchy and interconnection network.

“Multiphase problems are complex and require multiple global synchronizations, making them harder to scale than single phase laminar or turbulent flow simulation. Unstructured mesh and complex geometry add further complexity,” says Jysoo Lee, director, KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab. “Our scalability tests are not just designed for the sake of obtaining scalability at scale. This was a typical Aramco separation vessel with typical operation conditions, and larger core counts are added to reduce the time to solution. ANSYS provides a viable tool for Saudi Aramco to solve their design and analysis problems at full capacity of Shaheen. And for KAUST-Aramco R&D collaboration, this is our first development work.”

For more info, visit ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and KAUST.