Logo image
Reconfigurable multicore architecture for power flow calculation
Conference proceeding

Reconfigurable multicore architecture for power flow calculation

Kevin Cunningham, Prawat Nagvajara and Jeremy Johnson
2011 North American Power Symposium
Aug 2011

Abstract

Acceleration Field programmable gate arrays Hardware high-performance power flow computation LU decomposition Matrix decomposition Multicore processing Random access memory reconfigurable computing Software
This paper investigates the advantages of using multicore architectures, comprising high-performance processors and reconfigurable cores, for sparse Lower-Upper (LU) triangular decomposition, used in power flow calculations and contingency analysis. The proposed architecture combines a general-purpose processor with a custom row-reduction accelerator, sending streams of data to the accelerator through the use of a direct memory access module. The simple accelerator provides a speedup of 1.29X over existing high-performance sparse LU software on power system applications. As architectures with tightly-coupled processor cores and reconfigurable cores start to appear on the market, techniques presented in this paper provide a simple way to improve performance in important computations, such as those needed for power system analysis.

Metrics

20 Record Views

Details

Logo image