Parallel Computing Environments and Methods for Power Distribution System Simulation
Abstract
The development of cost-effective highperformance parallel computing on multi-processor supercomputers makes it attractive to port excessively time consuming simulation software from personal computers (PC) to super computes. The power distribution system simulator (PDSS) takes a bottom-up approach and simulates load at the appliance level, where detailed thermal models for appliances are used. This approach works well for a small power distribution system consisting of a few thousand appliances. When the number of appliances increases, the simulation uses up the PC memory and its runtime increases to a point where the approach is no longer feasible to model a practical large power distribution system. This paper presents an effort made to port a PC-based power distribution system simulator to a 128-processor shared-memory supercomputer. The paper offers an overview of the parallel computing environment and a description of the modification made to the PDSS model. The performance of the PDSS running on a standalone PC and on the supercomputer is compared. Future research direction of utilizing parallel computing in the power distribution system simulation is also addressed.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cs/0409035,
title = {Parallel Computing Environments and Methods for Power Distribution System Simulation},
author = {Ning Lu and Z. Todd Taylor and David P. Chassin and Ross T. Guttromson and R. Scott Studham},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0409035},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
7 pages, 4 figures, 6 tables, submitted to HICSS-38