685 research outputs found

    Enhancing grid reliability with coordination and control of distributed energy resources

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    The growing utilization of renewable energy resources (RES) within power systems has brought about new challenges due to the inherent uncertainty associated with RES, which makes it challenging to accurately forecast available generation. Further- more, the replacement of synchronous machines with inverter-based RES results in a reduction of power system inertia, complicating the task of maintaining a balance between generation and consumption. In this dissertation, coordinating Distributed Energy Resources (DER) is presented as a viable solution to these challenges.DERs have the potential to offer different ancillary services such as fast frequency response (FFR) when efficiently coordinated. However, the practical implementation of such services demands both effective local sensing and control at the device level and the ability to precisely estimate and predict the availability of synthetic damping from a fleet in real time. Additionally, the inherent trade-off between a fleet being available for fast frequency response while providing other ancillary services needs to be characterized. This dissertation introduces a fully decentralized, packet-based controller for a diverse range of flexible loads. This controller dynamically prioritizes and interrupts DERs to generate synthetic damping suitable for primary frequency control. Moreover, the packet-based control methodology is demonstrated to accu- rately assess the real-time availability of synthetic damping. Furthermore, spectral analysis of historical frequency regulation data is employed to establish a probabilis- tic bound on the expected synthetic damping available for primary frequency control from a fleet and the trade-off of concurrently offering secondary frequency control. It is noteworthy that coordinating a large number of DERs can potentially result in grid constraint violations. To tackle this challenge, this dissertation employs con- vex inner approximations (CIA) of the AC power flow to address the optimization problem of quantifying the capacity of a three-phase distribution feeder to accommo- date DERs. This capacity is often referred to as hosting capacity (HC). However, in this work, we consider separate limits for positive and negative DER injections at each node, ensuring that injections within these nodal limits adhere to feeder voltage and current constraints. The methodology dissects a three-phase feeder into individual phases and applies CIA-based techniques to each phase. Additionally, new approaches are introduced to modify the per-phase optimization problems to mitigate the inherent conservativeness associated with CIA methods and enhance HC. This includes selectively adjusting the per-phase impedances and proposing an iterative relaxation method for per-phase voltage bounds

    ACiS: smart switches with application-level acceleration

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    Network performance has contributed fundamentally to the growth of supercomputing over the past decades. In parallel, High Performance Computing (HPC) peak performance has depended, first, on ever faster/denser CPUs, and then, just on increasing density alone. As operating frequency, and now feature size, have levelled off, two new approaches are becoming central to achieving higher net performance: configurability and integration. Configurability enables hardware to map to the application, as well as vice versa. Integration enables system components that have generally been single function-e.g., a network to transport data—to have additional functionality, e.g., also to operate on that data. More generally, integration enables compute-everywhere: not just in CPU and accelerator, but also in network and, more specifically, the communication switches. In this thesis, we propose four novel methods of enhancing HPC performance through Advanced Computing in the Switch (ACiS). More specifically, we propose various flexible and application-aware accelerators that can be embedded into or attached to existing communication switches to improve the performance and scalability of HPC and Machine Learning (ML) applications. We follow a modular design discipline through introducing composable plugins to successively add ACiS capabilities. In the first work, we propose an inline accelerator to communication switches for user-definable collective operations. MPI collective operations can often be performance killers in HPC applications; we seek to solve this bottleneck by offloading them to reconfigurable hardware within the switch itself. We also introduce a novel mechanism that enables the hardware to support MPI communicators of arbitrary shape and that is scalable to very large systems. In the second work, we propose a look-aside accelerator for communication switches that is capable of processing packets at line-rate. Functions requiring loops and states are addressed in this method. The proposed in-switch accelerator is based on a RISC-V compatible Coarse Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs). To facilitate usability, we have developed a framework to compile user-provided C/C++ codes to appropriate back-end instructions for configuring the accelerator. In the third work, we extend ACiS to support fused collectives and the combining of collectives with map operations. We observe that there is an opportunity of fusing communication (collectives) with computation. Since the computation can vary for different applications, ACiS support should be programmable in this method. In the fourth work, we propose that switches with ACiS support can control and manage the execution of applications, i.e., that the switch be an active device with decision-making capabilities. Switches have a central view of the network; they can collect telemetry information and monitor application behavior and then use this information for control, decision-making, and coordination of nodes. We evaluate the feasibility of ACiS through extensive RTL-based simulation as well as deployment in an open-access cloud infrastructure. Using this simulation framework, when considering a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) application as a case study, a speedup of on average 3.4x across five real-world datasets is achieved on 24 nodes compared to a CPU cluster without ACiS capabilities

    Adaptive vehicular networking with Deep Learning

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    Vehicular networks have been identified as a key enabler for future smart traffic applications aiming to improve on-road safety, increase road traffic efficiency, or provide advanced infotainment services to improve on-board comfort. However, the requirements of smart traffic applications also place demands on vehicular networks’ quality in terms of high data rates, low latency, and reliability, while simultaneously meeting the challenges of sustainability, green network development goals and energy efficiency. The advances in vehicular communication technologies combined with the peculiar characteristics of vehicular networks have brought challenges to traditional networking solutions designed around fixed parameters using complex mathematical optimisation. These challenges necessitate greater intelligence to be embedded in vehicular networks to realise adaptive network optimisation. As such, one promising solution is the use of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to extract hidden patterns from collected data thus formulating adaptive network optimisation solutions with strong generalisation capabilities. In this thesis, an overview of the underlying technologies, applications, and characteristics of vehicular networks is presented, followed by the motivation of using ML and a general introduction of ML background. Additionally, a literature review of ML applications in vehicular networks is also presented drawing on the state-of-the-art of ML technology adoption. Three key challenging research topics have been identified centred around network optimisation and ML deployment aspects. The first research question and contribution focus on mobile Handover (HO) optimisation as vehicles pass between base stations; a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) handover algorithm is proposed and evaluated against the currently deployed method. Simulation results suggest that the proposed algorithm can guarantee optimal HO decision in a realistic simulation setup. The second contribution explores distributed radio resource management optimisation. Two versions of a Federated Learning (FL) enhanced DRL algorithm are proposed and evaluated against other state-of-the-art ML solutions. Simulation results suggest that the proposed solution outperformed other benchmarks in overall resource utilisation efficiency, especially in generalisation scenarios. The third contribution looks at energy efficiency optimisation on the network side considering a backdrop of sustainability and green networking. A cell switching algorithm was developed based on a Graph Neural Network (GNN) model and the proposed energy efficiency scheme is able to achieve almost 95% of the metric normalised energy efficiency compared against the “ideal” optimal energy efficiency benchmark and is capable of being applied in many more general network configurations compared with the state-of-the-art ML benchmark

    Recommendations for customer engagement strategies

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    Customers are expected to play a fundamental role in the transition to a decarbonised and digitalised energy system. However, experience so far suggests that customer engagement in energy markets cannot be given for granted. This report investigates those barriers hindering customer engagement in flexibility markets and discusses strategies for their mitigation, aiming to unlock the untapped potential of the resources located at the customer’s premises and foster a more consumer-centric power system. Drawing from an extensive and multi-disciplinary literature review and benefiting from interactions with OneNet cluster demonstrators, this research identifies economic, behavioural, legal, and technical barriers to customer engagement in flexibility markets. Tailored recommendations are provided to surmount each of these barriers, advocating, among other things, for value stacking support, targeted awareness campaigns, regulatory adaptations, and robust infrastructure enhancements

    PenChain: A Blockchain-Based Platform for Penalty-Aware Service Provisioning

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    Service provisioning is of paramount importance as we are now heading towards a world of integrated services giving rise to the next generation of service ecosystems. The huge number of service offerings that will be available to customers in future scenarios require a novel approach to service registry and discovery that allows customers to choose the offerings that best match their preferences. One way to achieve this is to introduce the provider’s reputation, i.e., a quality indicator of the provisioned service, as an additional search criterion. Now, with blockchain technology in our hands, automated regulation of service-level agreements (SLAs) that capture mutual agreements between all involved parties has regained momentum. In this article, we report on our full-fledged work on the conception, design, and construction of a platform for SLA-minded service provisioning called PenChain. With our work, we demonstrate that penalty-aware SLAs of general services–if represented in machine-readable logic and assisted by distributed ledger technology–are programmatically enforceable. We devise algorithms for ranking services in a search result taking into account the digitized values of the SLAs. We offer two scenario-based evaluations of PenChain in the field of precision agriculture and in the domain of automotive manufacturing. Furthermore, we examine the scalability and data security of PenChain for precision agriculture

    OSMOSIS: Enabling Multi-Tenancy in Datacenter SmartNICs

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    Multi-tenancy is essential for unleashing SmartNIC's potential in datacenters. Our systematic analysis in this work shows that existing on-path SmartNICs have resource multiplexing limitations. For example, existing solutions lack multi-tenancy capabilities such as performance isolation and QoS provisioning for compute and IO resources. Compared to standard NIC data paths with a well-defined set of offloaded functions, unpredictable execution times of SmartNIC kernels make conventional approaches for multi-tenancy and QoS insufficient. We fill this gap with OSMOSIS, a SmartNICs resource manager co-design. OSMOSIS extends existing OS mechanisms to enable dynamic hardware resource multiplexing on top of the on-path packet processing data plane. We implement OSMOSIS within an open-source RISC-V-based 400Gbit/s SmartNIC. Our performance results demonstrate that OSMOSIS fully supports multi-tenancy and enables broader adoption of SmartNICs in datacenters with low overhead.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures, 103 reference
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