ExaGridPF: A Parallel Power Flow Solver for Transmission and Unbalanced Distribution Systems
For power system engineers, this solver offers a scalable solution for power flow analysis on high-performance computing platforms.
The paper develops ExaGridPF, a parallel power flow solver for transmission and unbalanced distribution systems, achieving over 5x speedup on large-scale transmission topologies and significant efficiency gains for distribution networks.
This paper investigates parallelization strategies for solving power flow problems in both transmission and unbalanced, three-phase distribution systems by developing a scalable power flow solver, ExaGridPF, which is compatible with existing high-performance computing platforms. Newton-Raphson (NR) and Newton-Krylov (NK) algorithms have been implemented to verify the performance improvement over both standard IEEE test cases and synthesized grid topologies. For three-phase, unbalanced system, we adapt the current injection method (CIM) to model the power flow and utilize SuperLU to parallelize the computing load across multiple threads. The experimental results indicate that more than 5 times speedup ratio can be achieved for synthesized large-scale transmission topologies, and significant efficiency improvements are observed over existing methods for the distribution networks.