GridDyn is a power system simulator developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The name is a concatenation of Grid Dynamics, and as such usually pronounced as “Grid Dine”. It was created to meet a research need for exploring coupling between transmission, distribution, and communications system simulations.

While good open source tools existed on the distribution side, the open source tools on the transmission side were limited in usability either in the language or platform or simulation capability, and commercial tools, while quite capable, simply did not allow the access to the internal components and data required to conduct the research. Thus, the decision was made to design a platform that met the needs of the research project. Building off of prior efforts in grid simulation, GridDyn was designed to meet the current and future research needs of the various power grid related research and computational efforts.

It is written in C++, making use of recent improvements in the C++ standards. It is intended to be cross platform with regard to operating system and machine scale. The design goals were for the software to be easy to couple with other simulations, and to be easy to modify and extend. It is very much still in development and as such, the interfaces and code are likely to change, in some cases significantly as more experience and testing is done. It is our expectation that the performance, reliability, capabilities, and flexibility will continue to improve as projects making use of the code continue and new ones develop. We expect there are still many issues so any bug reports or fixes are welcome. And hopefully even in its current state and as the software improves the broader power systems research community will find it useful.

GridDyn is Open Source software, publicly available on GitHub at: github.com/llnl/griddyn under a BSD License.