Highly parallel boundary element method for solving extremely large, wide-area power-line models

Abstract

The electric and magnetic fields around power lines carry an immense amount of information about the power grid and can be used to improve stability, balance loads, conserve power, and reduce outages. To study this, an extremely large model of transmission lines over a 70-km2 tract of land near Washington, DC, has been built. The terrain was modeled accurately using 1-m-resolution LIDAR data. The 140-million-element power-line model was solved using the boundary element method, and the solvers were parallelized across DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory’s Centennial supercomputer using a modified version of the domain decomposition method. The code on each node was accelerated using the fast multipole method and, when available, GPUs. Additionally, larger test models were used to characterize the scalability of the code. The largest test model had 10,010,944,000 elements, and was solved on 1,024 nodes in 4.3 hours.