The Front Cover (100k JPEG)
FINDING BYPASSED OIL WITH TRACERS
At the Center for Subsurface Simulation (CSM) at the Texas Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics, researchers led by Steven Bryant and Mary Wheeler simulated a conservative tracer (yellow) and a partitioning tracer (blue) injected into a reservoir with heterogeneous permeability and oil distribution. The partitioning tracer is slowed relative to the conservative tracer when it encounters high oil saturations. The frames in this image were rendered and recorded in real time as the simulation ran on 16 nodes of an IBM SP. The visualization software, pV3, allows the user to explore the domain and examine multiple variables. The resulting elimination of file traffic, file storage and post-processing greatly speeds up the process of understanding the behavior of a physical problem. This capability is also a foundation for interactive steering of such simulations. See the story on the CSM involvement with NPACI.
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