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Power Systems Transient Stability - A Grand Computing Challenge

David Koester, Sanjay Ranka, and Geoffrey Fox

31 August 1992
SCCS-549

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 ( 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.





David P. Koester
Sun Oct 22 16:35:54 EDT 1995