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.Comment: ACM/IEEE DAC 2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1505.0669