Concurrent composite reliability evaluation using the state sampling approach

This paper presents a parallel methodology for composite reliability evaluation using Monte Carlo simulation by the state sampling approach. The methodology is based on coarse-grain parallelism, in which the adequacy analyses of the sampled system states are performed by different processors and the parallel process convergence is controlled by an asynchronous algorithm. The methodology was implemented on parallel and distributed processing environments: a ten-node IBM RS/6000 SP distributed memory parallel computer and a network of eight IBM RS/6000 43P workstations. The results obtained in tests with actual power system models show high speed-up and efficiency on both platforms and very good scalability. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.