Towards Efficient Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow Analysis on Graphical Processing Units

Abstract: We present a solution of sparse alternating current optimal power flow (ACOPF) analysis on graphical processing unit (GPU). In particular, we discuss the performance bottlenecks and detail our efforts to accelerate the linear solver, a core component of ACOPF that dominates the computational time. ACOPF analyses of two large-scale systems, synthetic Northeast (25,000 buses) and Eastern (70,000 buses) U.S. grids [1], on GPU show promising speed-up compared to analyses on central processing unit (CPU) using a state-of-the-art solver. To our knowledge, this is the first result demonstrating a significant acceleration of sparse ACOPF on GPUs.