Tuesday, 28 June 2016: 8:00 AM-9:30 AM
Research Summit
Chair:
Wangda Zuo, Ph.D., University of Miami
Technical Committee: 04.07 Energy Calculations
Building simulation can be used to help achieve energy efficient buildings. However, contemporary building simulation tends to be computationally intensive, which prevents building simulation from being widely applied in the real building process such as building design and operation. This seminar invites experts from both academic and industrial field to share ideas regarding how they improve the performance of different building simulations in terms of the computing demand and cost by taking full advance of cutting-edge computing technologies.
1 Fast Answers to Complex Problems for Dummies
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Nathaniel Jones, MIT |
Generally, modelers must accept either long wait times or devise clever shortcuts or simplifications. Parallel computation allows simulations to run many times faster, which often means that less involvement is required from the modeler, and graphics processing hardware is increasingly putting parallel computation in the hands of individuals. Case studies involving radiant heat exchange will be presented showing the speedup of complex simulations on highly parallel graphics processors that reduce both human and computer hours spent on simulation. The results show how parallel simulation hardware and software lead to time and cost savings in design and to more efficient buildings.
2 Building Energy Simulation Workflows in the Age of Low Cost Computing
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David Bosworth, BUILDlab, LLC |
Until recently the infrastructure and knowledge required to employ massively parallel computing techniques for building energy simulation was restricted to national labs and the largest engineering firms. Now that cloud computing resources, and the tools to use them without needing a doctorate in computer science, are available and cheap running one simulation is just as easy as running a hundred. This seminar explores how these tools are affecting and enhancing the building energy modeler's workflow and our ability to understand ourselves and communicate to our customers how buildings behave and where the best opportunities for energy efficiency are positioned.
3 Using High Performance Computers to Improve Foundation Heat Transfer Calculations
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Neal Kruis, Ph.D., Big Ladder Software |
Foundation heat transfer calculations for annual energy simulation is a complicated three-dimensional problem that can require days or weeks to solve using traditional numerical approaches. This presentation demonstrates how high performance computing enables the exploration of the parameters that impact both computation time and accuracy. By applying new calculation approaches, the computation time can be reduced to a matter of seconds while still maintaining greater than 97% accuracy.