Electrical Distribution Grid Visualization using Programmable GPUs Javier Novo

Abstract

Modern graphics cards enable applications to process big amounts of graphical data faster than CPUs, allowing high-volume parallelizable data to be visualized in real-time. In this paper, we present an approach to enable a power grid planning Computer- Aided-Design application to use this processing power to visualize electrical distribution grids in the fastest possible way. Specifically, the GPU has been programmed using Vertex Shaders in order to generate wide lines representing the power lines carrying a given power load. Furthermore, this kind of shaders was also used to translate the coordinates of the power grid from the geographic to the graphic domain, thus offloading this work from the CPU. As a result, the aforesaid application became able to render the visualization of power grids much faster and to offer highly responsive interactions with them.