Hi there.
I have a question regarding EnergyPlus simulation performance/speed and parallelisation.
We have created some software that allows us to split a simulation into multiple parts and run these simulations concurrently. This software currently runs on a single physical machine with a decent specification: AMD 8-core 3.00 GHz, 16GB RAM, SSD.
Unfortunatley we have noticed an interaction between instances of EnergyPlus when running multple simulations concurrently, e.g.
- 1 concurrent simulation run-time : 245 seconds
- 2 concurrent simulations run-time: 481 seconds
- 3 concurrent simulations run-time: 627 seconds
We expected that 2 concurrent simulations would run in the same time as 1 simulation. This was not the case, in fact we pay a time penalty for each additional concurrent simulation!!!
We repeated this experiment using virtual machines (in the Azure cloud). Our results were as originally expected e.g. 1 simulation took the same time to run as 2 (and 3, 4, etc.).
This leads us to believe there is a bottleneck caused by concurrent EnergyPlus simulation. We believe we have ruled out RAM & Storage (SSD).
Any thoughts and/or potential solutions would be greatly appreciated?
Regards, Stuart
