High Performance Simulations of Electrochemical Models on the Cell Broadband Engine

This article describes the use of the cell broadband engine as a high-performance platform for simulating the discharge of a lead acid battery to determine its state of health in an embedded application. The discharging of the battery is modelled as a twodimensional electrochemical process. The model equations are a set of coupled highly non-linear partial differential equations that evolve with time. At each time step, these equations are solved using Newton’s Method, and a direct skyline LU solver without partial pivoting is used to solve for the battery cell’s state at each Newton step. The entire model was implemented on a Sony Playstation 3 and the direct solver at each Newton iteration step exploits the parallelism in the Cell Broadband Engine to improve performance. The parallelized direct solver outperforms state-of-the-art dense and sparse linear solvers running on desktop workstations.