Contingency analysis (CA) requires fast executiontime for real-time power system operations. Because CA problems can naturally be divided into separate subtasks,parallel computing helps to speed up the computationtime. This paper proposes a master/slave parallel computingarchitecture and studies the computation of CA in alarge-scale power system through high performance computing,adopting a message passing interface for implementation.In particular, although the execution time of CAvaries, there is a tradeoff between having an imbalanced workload and ‘‘paying’’ a synchronization penalty for parallel computing: either factor blocks the progress of scalability. The proposed layered dynamic scheduling method is effective to tackle the challenge of high synchronization cost and work load imbalance and have the potential to further scale for the N - 2 contingency analysis.