computer power

maxwalch · Posts: 23

hello db team,
as you now know i'm working with a large model. my first question is on the power of the computer, because we want to order a new one.(i heard that companies which work with db have real big machines.) how powerful is your fastest pc? and second question: is a T7400 Intel Xeon X5472(3,oGhz,1600FSB,2x6MB,Quadcore) with 4GB Memory and 512MB nVidia Quadro FX 3700 enough to do the simulation and will this one be fast enough when i'm using the cfd tool in version 2?
thank you
max

Andy Tindale · Posts: 1115 Location: Stroud

Max,

I use a computer with an Intel 6600 dual core 2.4 GHz processor with 3325 MB memory and an NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450/4000 SDI card and this gives a good performance.

The spec. you give should provide you with a very good platform for DB. The 4 cores will help to keep other applications running smoothly while DB does it's simulations though I should say that the extra cores won't help much with speeding up the simulations themselves because EnergyPlus does not do parallel processing. The same principles probably also apply to CFD, though we haven't looked into CFD performance issues yet.

We find that provided you have a good 2 GB memory (or more if using Vista), and a fast(ish) processor then you won't be far off the optimum with DesignBuilder modelling and EnergyPlus simulations.

A good quality graphics card will help speed some modelling and visualisation tasks, especially when generating high quality hardware antialiased images.

I would be interested to hear other DB users experience on this. The general view so far seems to be that throwing expensive hardware at the simulation speed problem does not always give as good a speed improvement as you might hope.

Andy

lklawrie · Posts: 69

What I found of most influence for EnergyPlus simulations was the memory, not the processor speed. (this is a single core example though).

In the EnergyPlus readme, I note:
Suggestion: get as much memory as possible in your computer for running EnergyPlus. A recent team upgrade from 1.8GHZ machine with 768MB memory to a 2.1GHZ machine with 2G memory caused one file to go from a full annual simulation (5 zones) at about 8 minutes to a 2.25 minute run on the newer machine.

Some operating systems cannot access as much memory as manufacturers let you put in -- I have not evaluated how to get around that, yet.

maxwalch · Posts: 23

hello andy,
at first thank you for your reply.
secondly there's another question coming up. as you have written that my computer specification will probably be enough for the cfd tool but you havn't looked into cfd performance issues yet, i would like to know when you are planning to make the version 2 with cfd tool available, because in a former post you said that v2 will be released from aprli to june?
I ask, because i'm looking forward to this tool!
regards
max

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