MATEX: A Distributed Framework for Transient Simulation of Power Distribution Networks

TL;DR

MATEX is a distributed simulation framework for power distribution networks that leverages matrix exponential kernels and Krylov subspace methods to significantly accelerate transient analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a parallel, distributed approach using matrix exponential kernels with Krylov subspace approximations for efficient transient simulation of PDNs.

Findings

Achieves around 13X speedup over traditional methods.

Effectively handles stiffness issues with rational Krylov subspace.

Enables larger time steps with smaller Krylov bases.

Abstract

We proposed MATEX, a distributed framework for transient simulation of power distribution networks (PDNs). MATEX utilizes matrix exponential kernel with Krylov subspace approximations to solve differential equations of linear circuit. First, the whole simulation task is divided into subtasks based on decompositions of current sources, in order to reduce the computational overheads. Then these subtasks are distributed to different computing nodes and processed in parallel. Within each node, after the matrix factorization at the beginning of simulation, the adaptive time stepping solver is performed without extra matrix re-factorizations. MATEX overcomes the stiff-ness hinder of previous matrix exponential-based circuit simulator by rational Krylov subspace method, which leads to larger step sizes with smaller dimensions of Krylov subspace bases and highly accelerates the whole computation. MATEX outperforms both traditional fixed and adaptive time stepping methods, e.g., achieving around 13X over the trapezoidal framework with fixed time step for the IBM power grid benchmarks.