Application of high performance computing in california ISO's on-line DSA system

This paper discusses the implementation of an on-line dynamic security assessment (DSA) system at California ISO (CAISO). On-line DSA is a technology known to include massive amount of computations. CAISO has high standards on system models, computational tasks, result accuracy, and speed performance for such a function. Thus no compromise is allowed on technical approaches to be used and high performance computing (HPC) is considered as the means to address this challenge. A technique, referred to as distributed computation, in which the on-line DSA function is split into smaller computation tasks which are then allocated in multiple computation engines running in multiple computer CPU (or CPU cores) was designed and implemented. The details of this approach is presented in the paper, and the performance as well as operation experience of the on-line DSA system is discussed.