Towards Real-Time High Performance Computing For Power Grid Analysis

Abstract

Real-time computing has traditionally been considered largely in the context of single-processor and embedded systems, and indeed, the terms real-time computing, embedded systems, and control systems are often mentioned in closely related contexts. However, real-time computing in the context of multinode systems, specifically high-performance, cluster-computing systems, remains relatively unexplored. Imposing real-time constraints on a parallel (cluster) computing environment introduces a variety of challenges with respect to the formal verification of the system's timing properties. In this paper, we give a motivating example to demonstrate the need for such a system--- an application to estimate the electromechanical states of the power grid--- and we introduce a formal method for performing verification of certain temporal properties within a system of parallel processes. We describe our work towards a full real-time implementation of the target application--- namely, our progress towards extracting a key mathematical kernel from the application, the formal process by which we analyze the intricate timing behavior of the processes on the cluster, as well as timing measurements taken on our test cluster to demonstrate use of these concepts.