It is well recognized that one of the most computationally intensive problems encountered in the analysis and simulation of electric power systems if the transient stability problem. Hence it is this area in which the high speed parallel and vector computers being made available today, will find the most applicability in the near and distant future. One current trend in increasing the computational power of digital computing engines is to use inexpensive moderate speed processors and medium to large scale parallelism (10-1000 processors) such as the Sequent Balance, Encore Multimax, Intel iPSC, BBN Butterfly. Another trend is to use the more expensive high speed vector processors and small scale parallelism (1-10) such as the CRAY and IBM vector processors with parallel pipelines, while there are other computers with a foot in both camps, such as the Alliant. Frequency domain based algorithms, rather than traditional time domain algorithms, display three important characteristics which have the potential for utilizing the specialist architectures in the machines above. First, frequency domain techniques often lead to algorithms which are very naturally parallelizable, whereas time domain algorithms suffer from precedent relationships which are inherent in numerical integration schemes and limit the amount of exploitable parallelism. Second, frequency domain techniques applied to power system dynamics problems, often result in algorithms which are rich in highly vectorizable inner product calculations, contrasting the time domain algorithms, in which code vectorization is extremely limited. Third, frequency domain data compression can be easily exploited.
