Massively Parallel Real-Time Simulation of Very- Large-Scale Power Systems

System reductions or network equivalents are frequently used to reduce the scale of simulated power systems in electromagnetic transient simulation tools, and even more so in real-time software. However, complex hardware-in-the-loop studies involving multiple devices under test or focusing on widearea phenomena such as geomagnetically-induced currents or wide-spread ferroresonance require full modeling of large portions of the power system. The main technical challenges in very-large-scale real-time electromagnetic transient simulation reside in both hardware and software as both have to be able to support a very high degree of parallelism. This paper presents how the Hypersim real-time simulator was adapted to enable massively parallel electromagnetic transient simulations. The enabling features of the hardware platform, an SGI UV300 supercomputer, are reviewed in light of Hypersim’s needs. The required software modifications to achieve high levels of parallelism are then presented and discussed. A very-large-scale power system counting more than 16,000 electrical nodes, using as basic construction block a representation of Hydro-Québec’s power system, is used to illustrate the massively-parallel approach. Results, from both data acquisition services and IOs, are provided for a 200-core 30s real-time simulation. Various mapping of this very-large-scale power system on the UV300 are done to analyze performances in order to provide insights about the cost of massive parallelization.