An Application of GPU Parallel Computing to Power Flow Calculation in HVDC Networks

Numerical computation on GPU has become easily accessible and offers good computation power for relatively little cost. Recently an application of Newton-Rap son method for analyzing power flow in multi-terminal high-voltage direct current (HVDC) networks was proposed and shown to have good results on five terminal grids. Since this method involves costly matrix operation, especially the inverse, increasing the number of terminals in the grid yields prohibitively large execution times in sequential operation. To address this issue, we adjust the algorithm so that it benefits from parallel computation and test our approach on recent GPU from NVidia. We give experimental results for grids up to few thousand terminals and show that execution time is still acceptable for real applications. We also provide some benchmarks of the GPU computation compared with other platforms.