6X

6X is a new reservoir simulator. It has been created with massively parallel systems in mind from day one, on a new software architecture which also gives a degree of portability. 6X is capable of running on various hardware systems: CPUs (Intel & IBM Power), GPUs, MICs on clusters, workstations and PCs, while retaining integrity of results.

Ridgeway Kite recognizes that speed is not everything, however it is a basic requirement for today’s demanding engineering workflows. Portability, robustness, reliability and consistent results go hand in hand with speed as necessary fundamentals.

Whilst 6X does not yet have the full breadth of functionality of legacy simulators, a set of new, differentiating features are available, identified from a comprehensive and informed review of industry needs. All features that are developed in 6X are able to exploit the massively parallel architecture, and include:

• Scripting
• Multiple Realizations – History Matching, Development Optimization, Sensitivities,….
• Unconventionals
• Kriging
• Discretized wells
• Coarsening workflow
• 6X was developed with a compositional formulation. However, the current version supports black-oil problems. Support of compositional data is under development.

Input is via ECLIPSE keywords – which have been extended to cover the new functionality detailed above. Output is in Eclipse format files such as unified summary and unified restart files. However, 6X has its own html output for summary vectors and Excel output for Multiple Realisation runs.