PowerModels.jl: An Open-Source Framework for Exploring Power Flow Formulations

In recent years, the power system research community has seen an explosion of novel methods for formulating and solving power network optimization problems. These emerging methods range from new power flow approximations, which go beyond the traditional DC power flow by capturing reactive power, to convex relaxations, which provide solution quality and runtime performance guarantees. Unfortunately, the sophistication of these emerging methods often presents a significant barrier to evaluating them on a wide variety of power system optimization applications. To address this issue, this work proposes PowerModels, an open-source platform for comparing power flow formulations. From its inception, PowerModels was designed to streamline the process of evaluating different power flow formulations on shared optimization problem specifications. This work provides a brief introduction to the design of PowerModels, validates its implementation, and demonstrates its effectiveness with a proof-of-concept study analyzing five different formulations of the Optimal Power Flow problem

Digital signal processing: the impact of convergence on education, society and design flow

Design and development of real-time, memory and processor hungry digital signal processing systems has for decades been accomplished on general-purpose microprocessors. Increasing needs for high-performance DSP systems made these microprocessors unattractive for such implementations. Various attempts to improve the performance of these systems resulted in the use of dedicated digital signal processing devices like DSP processors and the former heavyweight champion of electronics design – Application Specific Integrated Circuits. The advent of RAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays has changed the DSP design flow. Software algorithmic designers can now take their DSP algorithms right from inception to hardware implementation, thanks to the increasing availability of software/hardware design flow or hardware/software co-design. This has led to a demand in the industry for graduates with good skills in both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This paper evaluates the impact of technology on DSP-based designs, hardware design languages, and how graduate/undergraduate courses have changed to suit this transition

Overview of Parallel Platforms for Common High Performance Computing

The paper deals with various parallel platforms used for high performance computing in the signal processing domain. More precisely, the methods exploiting the multicores central processing units such as message passing interface and OpenMP are taken into account. The properties of the programming methods are experimentally proved in the application of a fast Fourier transform and a discrete cosine transform and they are compared with the possibilities of MATLAB's built-in functions and Texas Instruments digital signal processors with very long instruction word architectures. New FFT and DCT implementations were proposed and tested. The implementation phase was compared with CPU based computing methods and with possibilities of the Texas Instruments digital signal processing library on C6747 floating-point DSPs. The optimal combination of computing methods in the signal processing domain and new, fast routines' implementation is proposed as well