Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
I have been running a bunch of EnergyPlus 8.3 simulations on a variety of processors lately and assuming that you have 2GB of memory for each simultaneous simulation that you are running, the biggest factor is the processor speed. I would recommend i7 (third or fourth generation at least). Overclocking helps some. I have not tested any i5 and the i3 that I tested was very slow. I have not gotten my hands on a fifth gen i7 yet but their specs make me think they will be a significant speed boost.
For simulations that I am doing at least, the I/O is a small amount of the total time so a solid state drive had no significant impact.
I have also been using Amazon to run some simulations and have found that c4.large instances are almost as fast as a fourth gen i7 and five hours cost less than a buck and can run two simultaneous simulations each.
