jEplus (1.7.2 and 2.0) stop responding after all jobs are done

asked 2019-12-06 20:52:44 -0600

vitorleiteg
85 ●4

updated 2020-01-15 11:31:22 -0600

__AmirRoth__

4446 ●5 ●17 http://bleedinggreenna...

Hello everyone. I am trying to run a sensitivity analysis with Simlab and jEPlus using SOBOL method. The total number of jobs is 2800 and I imported all the jobs directly from a csv file to jEPlus.

The problem is that after all the simulation jobs are finished, when I think the program is writing the final excel file containing all the results (as I specified on my rvx file, the program stops responding and all the time I used to simulate is basically lost, since no output was written because the program crashed. I waited over 24hrs and there is no change.

Since this crash happened once before (utilizing jEPlus 1.7.2) I tried dividing the whole simulation into small batches of 800jobs. Anyway the crash happened again.

link:image

So, I have a few questions:

Since its my first time doing a SA, is it really normal to take over 5 days to do 2800 simulation jobs? The outputs I am requesting are Hourly Operative temperature and Hourly Zone Mean Air Temperature. My PC has 16GB of memory RAM and a i5 - 6600K @3.50GHz CPU.
Is there anyway to recover all the jobs without running the whole simulation again? According to my rvx file, after the simulation is done a csv file containing those two outputs should be created for each job and one containing all of them together should be created at the end, but since the program crashed, neither happened.
Looking at the picture below, there is around 4GB of ram allocated to jEPlus. Increasing this number would increase simulation speed? Is this crash happening due to this? Also, during the simulation "Maximum moemory available to VM:" is 4GB but "Memory allocated" and "Memory used by jEplus" is super low (92MB and 68MB). Is that common?

Thank you,

Vitor L.

answered 2019-12-07 08:14:09 -0600

Yi Zhang
1250 ●11 ●6

updated 2019-12-07 08:14:37 -0600

Hi Vitor,

It is hard to know why jEPlus has stopped. As the journal shows it is at the start of collecting simulation results, what outputs are EnergyPlus producing in your project? If each job producing a lot of data, e.g. with hourly outputs, then the collection process can be quite long. I noticed that you are running the project on V: drive. Is this a network drive? If it is, and your output files are large, it will substantially lengthen the simulation time.

To your questions:

If each simulation takes more than 10 minutes, it will need 5 days to go through 2800 jobs on a 4-core i5. How complex is your model? If it is not particularly heavy, my suspicion is on the V: drive. Try to reduce the output from E+ as much as you can and then test a few on your local drive.
Hmm, there is a switch to let jEPlus skip jobs whose results are already in the output folder. However, this switch has been disabled in the GUI. If you cannot find a way to make the project run faster, I can give you a version to allow this feature.
Yes, jEPlus doesn't really need a lot of memory. As long as it is not using up to the limit, allocating more will no difference.

Cheers,

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Thank you for your answering and sorry for the long time without responding!

My V: drive is not a network drive, V: is the letter I chose when I installed a new HDD on my computer.
My model not particularly complex but the output is Hourly Operative Temperature which is why I think it is taking so long to finish (and I need hourly output to calculate overheating hours). So I think there isn't any other way to make it run faster.

vitorleiteg ( 2019-12-19 22:10:26 -0600 )edit

I think I found out what was making JEplus stop responding. My RVI had "usedInCalc :true" and because of that, when running a higher number of jobs, the process of writing the final Excel file containing all Jobs hourly results made the program run out of memory.

When running a small number, for example, 200, everything worked fine.

Thank you so much for you help!

vitorleiteg ( 2019-12-19 22:14:14 -0600 )edit

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