Power Distribution Management System revisited: Single-thread vs. Multithread Performance

Abstract

Power Distribution Management System (PDMS) uses very sophisticated algorithms to deliver reliable and efficient functioning of power distribution networks (PDN). PDNs are represented using very large sparse matrices, whose processing is computationally very demanding. Dividing large PDNs into smaller sub-networks results in smaller sparse matrices, and further processing each sub-network in parallel significantly improves the performance of PDMS. Using multithreading to further process each sub-network however degrades PDMS performance. Single-thread processing of sub-network sparse matrices gives much better performance results, mainly due to the structure of these matrices (indefinite and very sparse) and synchronization overhead involved in multi-thread operations. In this paper an overview of PDMS system is presented, and its performance given single-thread and multiple threads is compared. The results have shown that for some applications, single-threaded implementation in multi-process parallel environment gives better performance than multithreaded implementation.