ExaGridPF: A Parallel Power Flow Solver for Transmission and Unbalanced Distribution Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces ExaGridPF, a scalable parallel power flow solver designed for transmission and unbalanced distribution systems, achieving significant speedups and efficiency improvements on high-performance computing platforms.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel parallel power flow solver, ExaGridPF, compatible with HPC platforms, and demonstrates its effectiveness on large-scale transmission and distribution networks.

Findings

Over 5x speedup on large-scale transmission topologies

Significant efficiency gains over existing methods for distribution networks

Effective parallelization using SuperLU and current injection method

Abstract

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.