The increasing complexity of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems, driven by the high penetration of power electronics, advanced control, and digitalization, demands scalable, flexible real-time simulation platforms beyond traditional laboratory-based solutions. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying open-source real-time power system simulation frameworks on cloud-based infrastructures while meeting real-time computational constraints. An open-source architecture based on DPsim and the VILLAS framework is implemented and evaluated across five computing environments using open-source tools: bare-metal, non-cloud virtual machines, private cloud Kubernetes clusters, public cloud virtual machines, and public cloud Kubernetes clusters. Each environment is carefully configured and tuned using real-time operating systems, CPU isolation, and affinity mechanisms to improve deterministic behavior. Performance and scalability are assessed through a benchmark based on replicated IEEE 9-bus systems, progressively increasing system size, and measuring simulation-timestep execution time. The results show that cloud and cloud-like infrastructures can support soft and, under controlled conditions, firm real-time simulation tasks, although achievable system scale decreases as additional abstraction layers are introduced. The study identifies practical performance limits for each infrastructure and discusses their suitability for different real-time simulation and co-simulation applications. These findings demonstrate that cloud-based real-time simulation can complement traditional digital real-time simulators, enabling scalable and cost-effective CPES experimentation.
Noreña et al. (Mon,) studied this question.