Real-Time Simulation Platform Leverages IBM POWER8 Technology

RTDS Technologies announces NovaCor: a hardware platform for the RTDS Simulator featuring the simulation industry's fastest and most complex real time simulation capabilities. NovaCor features the performance of IBM's POWER8 processor and was developed with the support of the OpenPOWER Foundation.

The RTDS Simulator, introduced by RTDS Technologies in 1989, was the world's first fully digital real time power system simulator. For nearly three decades, the simulator's hardware architecture has consisted of processors housed in rack-mounted cards, exchanging data over a backplane. The NovaCor platform features an all-new architecture: each NovaCor unit houses a powerful multicore POWER8 processor, designed by IBM to deliver performance for emerging workloads. Rapid communication between the ten cores of each processor eliminates the need for backplane data transfer, allowing for much faster and more complex real time power system simulation than ever before.

Membership in the OpenPOWER Foundation was essential to the development process. RTDS Technologies was able to leverage the performance capabilities of POWER8 processing technology into an optimum solution for real time simulation. RTDS Technologies is the world's first (and currently the only) power system simulator developer to join OpenPOWER.

The NovaCor hardware platform is now available for order and is fully compatible with the RTDS Simulator's existing software platform, input/output and other auxiliary cards, and previous generations of processing hardware.

Learn more at http://www.rtds.com/novacor