SPARK: Simulation Platform for Advanced Real-time Knowledge

OPAL-RT system description

The hardware part of the OPAL-RT is built around the OP4610XG real-time simulator, which integrates a multi-core AMD Ryzen processor (6 cores, ~3.8 GHz) CPU with a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA (410T) designed for hardware-in-the-loop and rapid control prototyping applications in power systems and cyber-physical systems. The hybrid CPU-FPGA architecture enables deterministic, low-latency execution of complex dynamic models, making it suitable for real-time emulation of large-scale electrical networks and control systems. On the software side, the system runs on OPAL-RT Linux (real-time OS) with a real-time kernel, coupled with the RT-LAB environment, which provides model development, compilation, deployment, and monitoring. The models can be developed in MATLAB/Simulink and C/C++ and executed in real time on the target system.

NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU system description

The OPAL-RT is operated using MATLAB 2023b and RT-LAB v2024.1.6.55 installed in Dell Precision 3680 tower workstation equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU high-performance computing platform designed for engineering, machine learning, and real-time simulation applications. The GPU is powered by a 14th generation Intel Core i7-14700K, featuring 20 cores and 28 threads with a base frequency of 3.4 GHz, enabling efficient parallel computation and high single-thread performance.