Parallel Power Flow based on OpenMP

Integration of intermittent renewable energy resources to the power system necessitates the development of fast computational methods and tools to enable real-time monitoring, control, and decision making in the power grid. Generally, techniques which can be used to increase the computational speed are summarized in algorithm improvement and hardware acceleration. In this paper, the serial version of the Newton-Raphson power flow algorithm has been transformed to a parallel solution by using OpenMP standard. The parallel implementation is tested on several power systems and the computational efficiency is compared with varying thread numbers. The experimental results show more than three times speedup ratio achievement and significant computational time reduction.