High performance computing at ISO New England

Summary form only given. Power system simulation and optimization is highly computationally intensive. Along with market deregulation, power system planning and operation analysis needs more effective and faster techniques due to the ever-expanding study scenarios with large-scale interconnection of power networks. Meanwhile Market simulation tools with advanced optimization techniques are needed to simulate market behavior and varieties of market design issues. These market simulation tools need to handle nonlinearity, non-convex functions, integer variables. Significant increase in the level of uncertainty due to high penetration of variable resources, demand response, DER, microgrids and other Smart Grid technologies, requires new approaches to power system control and market operation. Stochastic and robust optimization methods are being considered as the technology for the future grid. These methods, to achieve tractability, require not only very efficient solution methodology, but highly efficient computing architectures. Not only the tractability and performance of the numerical algorithms, but significant increase in the data volumes requires high performance computing. Storing very large amounts of PMU data creates the need for new approaches in data management, including cloud computing, GPU, etc. This presentation will discuss the high performance computing needs at ISO New England across different business units, and the technologies being utilized to achieve efficiency. Applications include PSSE, TARA, PowerWorld, Enfuzion, and CycleCloud. Future plans in high performance computing will also be discussed.