Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
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For the rest of the world, I did some experiments and analysis of other data to get some rough estimates. On my laptop, a small building runs in just under a minute and a larger building in closer to six minutes. A benchmarking program run with the same background processes yields a speed of 60 GFlops.
Figuring out the total number of floating point operations and then working back how many time steps, I get that a small building is, to rough order, about 1 kFlop and a larger building is about 10 kFlop.
I also got similar numbers working back from some results from ORNL where they ran 525k simulations on 130k CPU in about 68 min on Titan and knowing about the CPUs that were used (Opteron 6274s)
Now I can get some estimates of how much CPU power is required to do coupled building/transportation/grid simulations in large urban areas. Working from information about the building stock in Chicago, it takes about 10MFlop to simulate a time step of a 1 mi^2 area. The traffic system only takes about 100 kFlop per time step to simulate the same area. I haven't got estimates for a detailed grid simulation but I'm a bit scared that it will be several orders of magnitude higher computational requirements.
