SABLE: GPU-Based Power Flow Accelerator for Sparsity-Aware Batched Learning

Abstract

Recent studies have developed GPU-based approaches for solving AC power flow and successfully applied them to standalone power flow problems. However, integrating these approaches into modern differentiable learning frameworks while preserving sparsity remains challenging. To this end, we present SABLE, a GPU-based sparse batched power flow accelerator for differentiable learning via an implicit power flow layer. SABLE leverages a block-diagonal embedding that reformulates batched three-dimensional Jacobians as a fixed-pattern two-dimensional sparse template that is shared across PyTorch, CuPy, and cuDSS. This common template enables zero-copy interoperability and memory-efficient sparse reuse across the software stack. On top of this representation, SABLE accelerates repeated power flow computations through reusable sparse templates, custom GPU kernels, a cuDSS-based sparse-direct LU solver, and mixed-precision techniques. Extensive experiments show that SABLE improves standalone power flow solving throughput by up to 253.4$\times$ over pandapower and 5.7$\times$ over ExaPF. In end-to-end training, evaluated on AC optimal power flow learning models based on DC3 and DeepLDE, SABLE expands the feasible training batch range by up to 64$\times$ and improves training throughput by up to 206.7$\times$ over the corresponding baseline.