The EP-Launch program allows you to do that if you're on windows. See the "Group of Input Files" tab.
Otherwise yes, use a python (or whatever language) script. I would recommend not bothering trying to rename the output files, instead use the -d, --output-directory ARG
arg to set the output directory.
I started throwing a small example to get you started, and then I figured I might as well take another couple of minutes and turn it into a github repo so it can be used by others. So here's a crude way of running multiple simulations in parallel using python: just paste your own .epw and .idf into the root folder and python Run_EnergyPlus_Simulations_In_Parallel.py
.
Under the hood it uses multiprocessing
to run simulations in parallel, and offloads to subprocess
for runs.
Github: jmarrec/RunMultipleSimulationsInParallel
And here is the direct link to the python snippet: Run_EnergyPlus_Simulations_In_Parallel.py
Note that if you really want filenames and not output directories to uniquely identify each sim, it'd be terribly easy to add this here on line 49: https://github.com/jmarrec/RunMultipl...
if res.returncode != 0:
...
else:
# simulation worked, copy the output file
out_file = os.path.join(out_dir, "eplusout.csv")
dest_file = os.path.join("Reports", f"{idf}_-_{epw}.csv")
shutil.copyfile(out_file, dest_file)
(of course, import shutil
at top of file)