New release 2023.04

Dear OPM community,

It is my pleasure to announce that the 2023.04 OPM release is now ready. Thanks to all contributors for your improvements to the software and documentation, and to users for alerting us to bugs and problems.

This release is dedicated to the memory of Ove Sævareid, who regrettably passed away suddenly this April. Ove was a long-standing contributor to OPM, and active up to the last. We are thankful for his contributions to the OPM community. His enthusiasm, know-how and scientific expertise will be missed by colleagues and friends.

The most significant change to OPM Flow for this release is that the simulator is now by default a lot more restrictive about accepting unsupported keywords in the input deck. Any keyword (or part of a keyword) that could potentially affect the simulation results and is not supported by OPM Flow will now prevent the simulator from running. Unsupported keywords such as ECHO/NOECHO that have no effect on the simulation will still be accepted with a warning. If you for any reason require less strict behaviour, you can use the command-line option:

--parsing-strictness=low

Adding that option will let OPM Flow ignore all unsupported keywords. In the opposite direction, using “high” instead of “low” will cause OPM Flow to stop for any unsupported keyword or parsing anomaly.

Full release notes will be available with the updated manual soon.

Binary packages for the 2023.04 OPM release are available for RHEL 7, as well as for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (code name Jammy Jellyfish) and 20.04 LTS (code name Focal Fossa). The Ubuntu packages may be downloaded from the OPM Project’s Personal Package Archive (ppa:opm/ppa).  If you have not already included this in your package sources, you can do so with the commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:opm/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Then you can install the simulator and its prerequisites using the command:

sudo apt install libopm-simulators-bin

You can install python bindings for opm via pip (https://pypi.org/project/opm/) using:

pip install opm

Best Regards,

Arne Morten Kvarving, SINTEF
Release manager for 2023.04