"Electromagnetic Transient Simulation of Large-Scale Electrical Power Networks Using Graphics Processing Units"

Jayanta Kumar Debnath (Ph.D. student)
Supervisor: Dr. Wai-keung Fung and Dr. Aniruddha M. Gole

Aim of Project

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based computing has attracted increasing attention in accelerating the computation of different general purpose applications including power system simulations. Application of GPU-computing in electromagnetic transient simulation of large electrical networks to speed up the computation process is the main focus of this research work.

Description of Project

Electromagnetic transient (EMT)-simulation has become a universal tool for the analysis of power systems. EMT-simulation is increasingly being used for larger and larger networks. Most of the available EMT-simulation tools are based on conventional sequential-processors where simulation is done in a sequential manner. Therefore, with the increase in network sizes there is a drastic increase in simulation time with the conventional central processing unit (CPU) based simulation tools. This research work shows that with a hybrid environment consisting of CPUs and GPUs, simulation time is greatly reduced compared to the CPU-only implementations. In this scheme the GPU is mainly deployed to perform the computationally intensive part of the simulation in parallel on its built-in multiple processing cores, and the CPU is assigned for different sequential jobs such as flow control of the simulation, storing the output variables, etc. So far, the GPU-based approach has shown promising results in EMT-simulation

Accepted/Published Papers

Jayanta Kumar Debnath, Wai-keung Fung, Aniruddha M. Gole, and Shaahin Filizadeh, "Simulation of Large-Scale Electrical Power Networks on Graphics Processing Units", 2011 IEEE Electrical Power and Energy Conference (EPEC-2011), October 3-5, 2011, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, pp. 284-289. FULL TEXT