Special purpose hardware for power system computation

This paper presents a cost effective approach, using special-purpose hardware implemented using field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) - commodity programmable hardware, to accelerate the performance of key components of an energy management system (EMS). These components include state estimation, optimal power flow, and load flow computation. All of these components have at their core the solution of large sparse linear systems, which can be effectively accelerated by the proposed hardware. Predicted performance on a series of power system benchmarks suggest up to an order of magnitude speedup over conventional approaches. The improved performance should enhance the day-to-day operation of the power grid, by providing the operator with more complete and accurate information.