PGT_SOLVER: An efficient solver for power grid transient analysis

In this paper, we propose PGT_SOLVER - an effecient solver for power grid transient analysis. It is based on direct solver. The conductance matrix is SPD and is generated by modifying the matrix for DC analysis. Modified sparse vector technique is proposed to obtain solutions of interested nodes by performing partial forward and backward substitutions. Smart mapping technique is presented to obtain correct solutions without reordering the right-hand-side vector. Moreover, memorized supernode technique is utilized to speed up the substitution process. A effortless but effective parallel strategy with multiple threads is introduced to further accelerate the simulation. This software won the 1st place at “TAU 2012 Power Grid Simulation Contest”. Experimental results on several industrial benchmarks show that this solver can get solutions fast without introducing any error. The memory consumption is also very affordable.