Analysis of performance accelerator running ETMSP. Final report

This project focused on predicting the performance of ETMSP, EPRI`s extended transient midterm stability program, running on PACE{trademark}/64, a 64-processor multiprocessing environment developed by the contractor, Performance Processors, Inc (PPI). PACE`s strength lies in solving large sparse-matrix problems quickly, exploiting parallel processing, PPI modified ETMSP 2P2 to run on a uniprocessor emulation of PACE, then measured parallel performance of ETMSP using five significant industry cases. Parallel ETMSP achieves breakthrough core speedups of approximately 29x from parallelism alone, well above the 4--8x range typical of prior work. Furthermore, the speedups on components of ETMSP suggest that PACE has the potential to accelerate other power-system applications with a sparse-matrix core. The overall purpose of this project was to provide fast transient analysis in support of on-line Dynamic Security Analysis (DSA). In 10 minutes, ETMSP`s core running on PACE/64 can evaluate 50 contingencies averaging 10 simulated seconds each for a 5000-bus power system with full generator and load modeling. In contrast, a 1993 workstation can process 1-2 contingencies in 10 minutes. Thus, ETMSP/PACE represents a considerable advance in the speed of transient stability analysis and a viable basis for an on-line DSA.