OpenCL-Accelerated Probabilistic Power Flow for Active Distribution Networks

Open computing language (OpenCL) is an open standard developed for general purpose parallel programming of heterogeneous computing devices. OpenCL can be used to exploit the massively parallel architecture of graphics processing units (GPU) in performing non graphic tasks. This paper presents an OpenCL parallel implementation of Monte-Carlo simulation based probabilistic power flow analysis for large active distribution systems. The proposed implementation adopts single precision arithmetic and is independent of third-party linear algebra libraries, which makes it suitable for standalone implementation and use on any mainstream GPU. Moreover, given that it adopts the OpenCL programing model, the proposed approach may also be used on multicore CPUs. The accuracy and speedup of the proposed implementation is validated using several test systems, of sizes ranging from 32 to 10476 buses. The results show that the proposed parallelized implementation can achieve substantial speedups without requiring high performance computing purposed hardware.