Exploiting Coarse-Grained Parallelism Using Cloud Computing in Massive Power Flow Computation

Abstract

We present a novel architecture of parallel contingency analysis that accelerates massive power flow computation using cloud computing. It leverages cloud computing to investigate huge power systems of various and potential contingencies. Contingency analysis is undertaken to assess the impact of failure of power system components; thus, extensive contingency analysis is required to ensure that power systems operate safely and reliably. Since many calculations are required to analyze possible contingencies under various conditions, the computation time of contingency analysis increases tremendously if either the power system is large or cascading outage analysis is needed. We also introduce a task management optimization to minimize load imbalances between computing resources while reducing communication and synchronization overheads. Our experiment shows that the proposed architecture exhibits a performance improvement of up to 35.32× on 256 cores in the contingency analysis of a real power system, i.e., KEPCO2015 (the Korean power system), by using a cloud computing system. According to our analysis of the task execution behaviors, we confirmed that the performance can be enhanced further by employing additional computing resources.