Application of PGAS Programming to Power Grid Simulation

This paper will describe the application of the PGAS Global Arrays (GA) library to power grid simulations. The GridPACK™ framework has been designed to enable power grid engineers to develop parallel simulations of the power grid by providing a set of templates and libraries that encapsulate most of the details of parallel programming in higher level abstractions. The communication portions of the framework are implemented using a combination of message-passing (MPI) and one-sided communication (GA). This paper will provide a brief overview of GA and describe in detail the implementation of collective hash tables, which are used in many power grid applications to match data with a previously distributed network.