MATEX: A Distributed Framework for Transient Simulation of Power Distribution Networks

Abstract: We proposed MATEX, a distributed framework for transient simulation of power distribution networks (PDNs). MATEX utilizes matrix exponential kernel with Krylov subspace approximations to solve differential equations of linear circuit. First, the whole simulation task is divided into subtasks based on decompositions of current sources, in order to reduce the computational overheads. Then these subtasks are distributed to different computing nodes and processed in parallel. Within each node, after the matrix factorization at the beginning of simulation, the adaptive time stepping solver is performed without extra matrix re-factorizations. MATEX overcomes the stiff-ness hinder of previous matrix exponential-based circuit simulator by rational Krylov subspace method, which leads to larger step sizes with smaller dimensions of Krylov subspace bases and highly accelerates the whole computation. MATEX outperforms both traditional fixed and adaptive time stepping methods, e.g., achieving around 13X over the trapezoidal framework with fixed time step for the IBM power grid benchmarks.