ExaGridPF: A parallel power flow solver for transmission and unbalanced distribution systems

This paper investigates parallelization strategies for solving power flow problems in both transmission and unbalanced, three-phase distribution systems by developing a scalable power flow solver, ExaGridPF, which is compatible with existing high performance computing platforms. Newton-Raphson (NR) and Newton-Krylov (NK) algorithms have been implemented to verify the performance improvement over both standard IEEE test cases and synthesized grid topologies. For three-phase, unbalanced system, we adapt the current injection method (CIM) to model the power flow and utilize SuperLU to parallelize the computing load across multiple threads. The experimental results indicate that more than 5 times speedup ratio can be achieved for synthesized large-scale transmission topologies, and significant efficiency improvements are observed over existing methods for the distribution networks.