Enabling interactive and collaborative oil reservoir simulations on the Grid

Grid-enabled infrastructures and problem-solving environments can significantly increase the scale, cost-effectiveness and utility of scientific simulations, enabling highly accurate simulations that provide in-depth insight into complex phenomena. This paper presents a prototype of such an environment, i.e. an interactive and collaborative problem-solving environment for the formulation, development, deployment and management of oil reservoir and environmental flow simulations in computational Grid environments. The project builds on three independent research efforts: (1) the IPARS oil reservoir and environmental flow simulation framework; (2) the NetSolve Grid engine; and (3) the Discover Grid-based computational collaboratory. Its primary objective is to demonstrate the advantages of an integrated simulation infrastructure towards effectively supporting scientific investigation on the Grid, and to investigate the components and capabilities of such an infrastructure.