​​​​ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have achieved a new supercomputing milestone by scaling ANSYS Fluent to nearly 200,000 processor cores. This record represents a more than five-fold increase over the record set just three years ago, which will enable organizations to make critical decisions faster and increase the overall efficiency of oil and gas production facilities.

The calculations were run on the Shaheen II, a Cray XC40 supercomputer, hosted at the KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab (KSL). By leveraging high-performance computing (HPC), ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and the KSL sped up a complex simulation of a separation vessel from several weeks to an overnight run. This simulation is critical to all oil and gas production facilities – empowering organizations around the world to reduce design development time and better predict equipment performance under varying operational conditions. Saudi Aramco will apply this technology to make more-informed, timely decisions to retrofit separation vessels to optimize operation throughout an oil field's lifetime.

"Today's regulatory requirements and market expectations mean that manufacturers must develop products that are cleaner, safer, more efficient and more reliable," said Wim Slagter, director of HPC and cloud alliances at ANSYS. "To reach such targets, designers and engineers must understand product performance with higher accuracy than ever before – especially for separation technologies, where an improved separation performance can immediately increase the efficiency and profitability of an oil field. The supercomputing collaboration between ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and KSL enabled enhanced insight in complex gas, water and crude-oil flows inside a separation vessel, which include liquid free-surface, phase mixing and droplets settling phenomena."