Evaluating High Performance Computing (HPC) requirements of devices on the Smart Grid for increased cybersecurity

There has been a lot of research in developing technologies and strategies to make Smart Grid a practical reality. Research has focussed on a wide range of domains like communication technologies and protocols, infrastructure reliability and availability, designing of intelligent applications and distribution automation. However, to make Smart Grid to be widely accepted and adopted by the community, security at all levels of the smart grid will have to be ensured. Although, existing security approaches could be applied to control cybercrime on the smart grid, the limited latency tolerance of communications within certain levels of the smart grid make it challenging. With an aim to address this problem, the paper makes three important contributions. First, it introduces a classification of devices used in the smart grid based on their computational capabilities. Second, it highlights the challenges faced in addressing the high performance computational requirements of cybersecurity in the smart grid. Third, it proposes a few practical solutions from research in advanced processor and accelerators architectures and parallel computing paradigms commonly used in the field of High Performance Computing in addressing them. Overall, a strong case is presented to revisit the standards that specify the minimum processor requirements of devices connected to the smart grid at all levels to increase cybersecurity on the smart grid.