ESPSim: An Efficient Scalable Power Grid Simulator Based on Parallel Algebraic Multigrid

Abstract

Fast verification for the extremely large-scale power grid is demanding as CMOS technology advances consistently. In this work, we propose ESPSim, an efficient scalable power grid simulator based on a parallel smoothed aggregation-based algebraic multigrid technique. ESPSim has the ability to do fast DC and transient analysis through MPI and adaptive timestep control mechanism. Thanks to the smoother applied on the prolongation operator, ESPSim copes well with the convergence rate on extremely large-scale power grid transient analysis. Extensive experiments are conducted with a variety of serial/parallel solvers. The runtime of ESPSim is linear with case size. With 16 processors, 1,000 timesteps transient analysis of 63.4M nodes can be completed in 22.1 min. Over 22× speedup compared to the well-known direct solver Cholmod is observed.