EmPower: An Efficient Load Balancing Approach for Massive Dynamic Contingency Analysis in Power Systems

Power system simulations involving solution of thousands of stiff differential and algebraic equations (DAE) are computationally intensive and yet crucial for grid security and reliability. Online simulations of a large number of contingencies require very high computational efficiency. Furthermore, since the simulation times across the contingencies vary considerably, dynamic load balancing of parallel contingency analysis (CA) is required to ensure maximum resource utilization. However, the state-of-the-art contingency analysis techniques fail to fulfill this requirement. In this paper, we present EmPower, an Efficient load balancing approach for massive dynamic contingency analysis in Power systems. For single contingency analysis, EmPower uses time domain simulations and incorporates efficient numerical algorithms for solving the DAE. Further, the contingency analysis approach is scaled for large scale contingency analysis using MPI based parallelization. For enabling an efficient, non-blocking implementation of work-stealing, multithreading is employed within each processor. Simulations of thousands of contingencies on a supercomputer have been performed and the results show the effectiveness of EmPower in providing good scalability and huge computational savings.