Using Local Grid and Multi-core Computing in Electromagnetic Transients Simulation

This paper presents a method to implement the Electromagnetic Transients (EMT) simulation algorithm on a multi-core or grid processing platform. The simultaneous use of multiple processors to divide and solve portions of the simulation has the potential to speed up the overall simulation significantly. However, communication bottlenecks can reduce its effectiveness. This paper uses the Electric Network Interface (ENI), which is a TCP based communication interface implemented using transmission lines (t-lines) as natural interface ports. ENI allows the sub-systems on either side of t-lines to be simulated on separate processors on both local host and distributed computers connected by standard local area networks (LAN). Using several implementation examples, it is shown that the communication bottleneck is significant when the execution time for each subsystem is small, and can result in slower simulations than on a single processor. However, with sufficiently large subsystems, there is significant speed-up to the overall execution time.