Benchmarking CPU, GPU, and ML Power-Flow Solvers from 14 to 70,000 Buses

Overview & Synopsis

Learned surrogates for power-flow (PF) computation are usually motivated by speed, compared against a single CPU-based baseline. We show this comparison is fragile: across 7 open-source CPU-based solvers evaluated on identical inputs, throughput varies by roughly 2.5-3 orders of magnitude, so the choice of baseline alone can flip the conclusion. We build a benchmark spanning 9 physics-based solvers: 7 CPU-based and 2 GPU-based, including a new batched GPU solver, gumsim2grid - and 3 published ML surrogates, evaluated under a shared, independently implemented KCL-mismatch check across 15 grids from 14 to 70,000 buses. On the PF task itself, a sufficiently parallelized CPU solver or gpusim2grid matches or exceeds the throughput of the ML surrogates we test while remaining orders of magnitude more accurate; we find no evidence that these GNN-style surrogates are yet competitive for PF specifically, though prior work reports genuine gains on related but more combinatorial tasks such as optimal power flow or power grid control. Beyond this finding, we hope the benchmark suite, code and reference evaluator released at https://github.com/Grid2op/gpusim2grid helps close a broader reproducibility gap in this space, where batched GPU-based PF solvers are rarely open-sourced or evaluated against a common set of baselines.