And a third simulation models how the oil motion affects the seismic image. Texaco has drilled a well in the Gulf of Mexico that pumps out 1,500 barrels of bypassed oil per day. Besides helping to zero in on bypassed oil, the technology lets the oil companies continuously monitor production. Mello believes that this is just the beginning. New advances taking place at IBM Research in simulation, visualization and data mining, he predicts, will achieve more and more realistic pictures of the subsurface and make hunting for oil a more exact and less costly proposition.
Space is defined as a mesh and time as individual time steps, like the frames in a motion picture.
The simulation keeps track of a set of conditions at each mesh point - pressure, heat, chemical composition, rate of deposition of sediment and so on. The physical and chemical laws governing the geological processes are approximated by a set of mathematical and computational rules that allow the computer to calculate the conditions at each mesh point at one time step, given the conditions at all mesh points from previously calculated time steps. The initial set of conditions must be provided by whoever is performing the simulation. Generally, conditions at one mesh element depend mainly on conditions at nearby elements. As a result, a simulation's space domain can be split up into many subdomains to run on hundreds of processors in parallel.