Thread Group Multithreading: Accelerating the Computation of an Agent-Based Power System Modeling and Simulation Tool -- C GridLAB-D

GridLAB-D™ is an open source next generation agent-based smart-grid simulator that provides unprecedented capability to model the performance of smart grid technologies. Over the past few years, GridLAB-D has been used to conduct important analyses of smart grid concepts, but it is still quite limited by its computational performance. In order to break through the performance bottleneck to meet the need for large scale power grid simulations, we develop a thread group mechanism to implement highly granular multithreaded computation in GridLAB-D. We achieve close to linear speedup on the multithread version running on general purpose multi-core commodity for a benchmark simple house model. The performance of the multithreading code also shows very favorable scalability properties, resource utilization, and much shorter execution time for large-scale complex power grid simulations.