An Approach to Implementing High-Performance Computing for Problem Solving in Workflow-Based Energy Infrastructure Resilience Studies

Abstract

Implementing high-performance computing (HPC) to solve problems in energy infrastructure resilience research in a heterogeneous environment based on an in-memory data grid (IMDG) presents a challenge to workflow management systems. Large-scale energy infrastructure research needs multi-variant planning and tools to allocate and dispatch distributed computing resources that pool together to let applications share data, taking into account the subject domain specificity, resource characteristics, and quotas for resource use. To that end, we propose an approach to implement HPC-based resilience analysis using our Orlando Tools (OT) framework. To dynamically scale computing resources, we provide their integration with the relevant software, identifying key application parameters that can have a significant impact on the amount of data processed and the amount of resources required. We automate the startup of the IMDG cluster to execute workflows. To demonstrate the advantage of our solution, we apply it to evaluate the resilience of the existing energy infrastructure model. Compared to similar approaches, our solution allows us to investigate large infrastructures by modeling multiple simultaneous failures of different types of elements down to the number of network elements. In terms of task and resource utilization efficiency, we achieve almost linear speedup as the number of nodes of each resource increases.