One Hour Ahead Computation of Large-Scale Electric Power Network Transport Capability

该合同是在运输工业工程探索性研究（ETI）项目招标下获得的。本研究涉及开发一种可扩展的专用混合计算架构，该架构包括细粒度并行模拟处理和数字控制以及可重构性，以加速大规模电网传输容量的计算。这个为期一年的探索性项目的研究将沿着三条路线并行进行。首先，解决稳态功率流问题所需的核心模拟计算单元将被设计、模拟、制造和实验测试，以确定其潜在的精度和计算吞吐量。其次，通过仿真发展和完善并行模拟求解方法。第三，将启动可扩展架构的工作。该体系结构应支持数字可重构性以及解决大规模网络问题所需的控制、通信和数据存储。如果这项研究取得成功，最终可能会开发出一种专门的芯片组或加速器板，它们将与工程工作站接口，并可以执行近乎实时的稳态功率流方程解决方案。这样的加速板类似于广泛用于加速计算密集型计算机图形任务的专用图形卡。

This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. This research involves the development of a scalable special-purpose hybrid computing architecture comprising fine-grained parallel analog processing and digital control and reconfigurability to accelerate the computation of large-scale electric power network transfer capacity. The research in this one-year exploratory program will proceed concurrently along three lines. First, the core analog computational units needed to solve the steady-state power-flow problem will be designed, simulated, fabricated, and tested experimentally to determine their potential accuracy and computational throughput. Second, the parallel analog solution method will be developped and refined through simulation. Third, work on a scalable architecture will be initiated. The architecture should support digital reconfigurability as well as the control, communications, and data storage needed for the solution of large-scale network problems. If this research is successful, it could result eventually in the development of a specialized chip set or an accelerator board that would interface with an engineering workstation and could perform a near real-time solution of the steady-state power-flow equations. Such an accelerator board would be something like the specialized graphics cards that are widely for used for accelerating compute-intensive computer graphics tasks.