Impact of CPU Choice on Large Scale Reservoir Simulations

In this paper, we will discuss how to achieve the optimal price/performance and the optimal price/energy values in a complex compute environment like reservoir simulation. We will also discuss our experimentation with different CPU models and the impact of our selection on the users’ experience and data center electric power consumption using thevaried CPU models of the same generation with different number of cores and different clock speeds. For example, Intel® Ivy Bridge CPU have different SKUs with different power consumption, number of cores, threads, clock speeds, etc. Buying the highest clock speed with the highest number of cores may not be the optimal choice for a large system in a computer center. Some applications will not scale well as the number of cores increases keeping the same number of memory channels. Some applications also will not benefit from high clock speed.