The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory collaborated with three other Department of Energy facilities to conduct the largest simulation of power grid interruption and response using the Frontier supercomputer.
Frontier operator Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories participated in the experiment as part of the Exascale Computing Project’s ExaSGD project, LLNL said Monday.
Scientists ran the HiOp pen-source optimization solver on 9,000 nodes of Frontier to go through 100,000 possible grid failures and weather scenarios in 20 minutes.
They used the data to determine the grids’ safest and most reliable level of operational capacity.
“The goal of this project was to show that the exascale computers are capable of exhaustively solving this problem in a manner that is consistent with current practices that power grid operators have,” said Cosmin Petra, computational mathematician and principal investigator for LLNL.