SBIR-STTR Award

Actionable understanding of subsurface processes is required by multiple small and medium size companies involved in environmental cleanup and subsurface energy production. Having actionable understanding means that stakeholders (1) can assess and evaluate the merits and risks of different operational strategies given certain initial conditions and (2) modify these strategies over time as a function of observed data and process understanding. While a number of open source High Performance Computing (HPC) codes exist which can provide this actionable understanding small and medium companies generally do not have the institutional knowledge nor the cyber infrastructure required to use these codes. This is the problem that this SBIR addresses. A cloud based software package is being developed which will allow small and medium sized companies to create projects, discover and ingest site data, run application specific models and perform parameter estimation and model optimization. This software will automatically ingest and manage project data and provide advanced data visualization and analytics capabilities so that small and medium companies can access and use advanced HPC modeling capabilities without needing to become experts in code installation and parameterization. In Phase I we will design and implement an initial version of our software package which will allow for project setup, automated data ingestion, scenario modeling and parameter estimation. We will test this software using industry users. This system will allow small and medium sized companies to obtain actionable understanding on processes related to environmental cleanup and subsurface energy production.

Actionable understanding of subsurface processes is required by multiple small and medium size companies involved in environmental cleanup and subsurface energy production. Having actionable understanding means that stakeholders (1) can assess and evaluate the merits and risks of different operational strategies given certain initial conditions and (2) modify these strategies over time as a function of observed data and process understanding. While a number of open source High Performance Computing (HPC) codes exist which can provide this actionable understanding small and medium companies generally do not have the institutional knowledge nor the cyber infrastructure required to use these codes. This is the problem that this SBIR addresses. A cloud-based software package is being developed which will allow small and medium sized companies to create projects, discover and ingest site data, run application specific models and perform parameter estimation and model optimization. This software will automatically ingest and manage project data and provide advanced data visualization and analytics capabilities so that small and medium companies can access and use advanced HPC modeling capabilities without needing to become experts in code installation and parameterization. In Phase I we developed and demonstrated an initial version of our software package which allows for project setup, scenario modeling and parameter estimation. In Phase II we will build on this by expanding the modeling capabilities, adding codes for geophysical inversion and fracture modeling and adding unstructured grid support and decision support capabilities. This system will allow small and medium sized companies to obtain actionable understanding on processes related to environmental cleanup and subsurface energy production.