NPAC Technical Report SCCS-549
Power Systems Transient Stability - A Grand Computing Challenge
David Koester, Sanjay Ranka, Geoffrey Fox
Submitted October 01 1993
Abstract
Real-time or faster-than-real-time power system transient
stability simulations will have significant impact on the future
design and operations of both individual electrical utility companies
and large interconnected power systems. Sufficiently fast transient
stability simulation implementations may significantly improve power
system reliability which, in turn, will positively affect electrical
utility company profits, environmental impact, and customer
satisfaction. Past research into techniques to enhance the
performance of transient stability simulations has included both
concurrent processing and better algorithms, however, there are still
considerable areas for research into this problem. The scope of
real-time or faster-than-real-time transient stability analysis places
this application in the category of being a grand computing challenge
that could benefit from future teraflop ({\em trillion} floating-point
operations per second) supercomputers. This paper describes various
research areas that are of interest to the computational science
academic community that offer promise to improve the quality and
performance of power system transient stability simulations. Many of
the research areas offer competitive alternatives for performance
improvements; consequently, a parallel transient stability testbed at
the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse
University is proposed. We believe that it is possible to develop
scalable transient stability algorithms using both concurrent
computers and more efficient algorithms that could offer speedups of
100 on 32-processor distributed-memory multicomputers when compared to
sequential codes such as the EPRI-Extended Transient/Mid-Term
Stability Program. Even greater speedups would be possible on
multicomputers with more processors.