2012 TAU power grid simulation contest: Benchmark suite and results

Although power grid analysis has been an active research area for a number of years, increasing chip size has exposed new challenges in this traditional topic. The simulation of these large scale networks is becoming a dominant step in the design verification flow and it often requires the very largest computer available to the design team. To spur academic research in this vital verification step, the IBM Austin Research Laboratory, with support from the ACM TAU Workshop, has successfully organized two annual TAU Power Grid Simulation Contests, and over twenty university teams across the world have participated. For 2012, the contest is focused on dynamic analysis and parallel implementation. In this paper, the organizers review the TAU 2012 Power Grid Simulation Contest. This contest was held to seek new efficient methods with parallel implementation for performing dynamic (i.e. time domain) analysis for large power grid networks. Accuracy, run-time and memory consumption were used as metrics to evaluate the various contestants, and prizes were accordingly awarded to the top three teams. The benchmarks in [1] were expanded to be suitable for dynamic analysis. These are made public, along with the scores from various teams that participated in the contest, in order to further encourage their use in future research on this important topic.