OPM

The Open Porous Media (OPM) initiative is a research and development project aimed at developing high quality software for simulation of flow in porous media. The software has been developed in a research context, but it has been developed in cooperation with industry partners, and industrial relevance has always been important.

The OPM project was initiated before 2010, the initial focus was on creating specialized simulators for dynamic upscaling. About 2013 a full blackoil reservoir simulator was deemed a realistic goal, and development of the reservoir simulator flow commenced. In addition to the general blackoil capabilities flow has developed specialized functionality for e.g. CO₂ sequestration and polymer flooding.

The OPM project is an open source project, where all software developed and distributed is developed with an open development model. In the context of the OPM-OP company the reservoir simulator flow is the most important product, but also the 3D visualization software Resinsight is developed as part of the OPM project. More information about the opm project can be found on the homepage: https://opm-project.org . The development of the OPM projects, including flow, mainly takes place on https://github.com/opm/ , here anyone can follow the development on a daily basis, and also get in touch with developers via the GitHub interface.

The OPM effort has been financed by research councils in Norway and EU, and industry partners - mainly Equinor. Development has been performed by a long list of different developers, coming from research institutions like Sintef, Norce and TNO, the industry and also individual developers.

flow

The reservoir simulator flow is the flagship of the opm project. flow is a fully implicit blackoil simulator. flow uses the same input and output format as the ECLIPSE100 reservoir simulator from Schlumberger. Most of the basic keywords are supported, and in the case all the required functionality is present in flow it can be used interchangeably with ECLIPSE100 including restart. The manual documents exactly which keywords are supported.

Linux is the officially supported platform, but several developers also work on MacOS - so that generally also works. Users of Windows10 have succesfully run flow with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). flow has mature support for parallel simulations with MPI, experimental work to support GPU based parallelization is in progress.

A reference publication for flow can be found here.