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NERSC Initiative for Scientific Exploration (NISE) 2011 Awards

Threading EnergyPlus Using OpenMP

Noel Keen, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

NISE project m1116, Principal Investigator: Philip Haves

NISE Award: 100,000 Hours
Award Date: March 2011

EnergyPlus is an industry standard building simulation code. It models the energy performance of any type of building including effects such as HVAC systems, various window materials, accurate weather considerations, solar shading, occupancy rates as a function of time, thermal comfort of occupants, etc. EnergyPlus has a large user base and is often used by architects when designing buildings.

The EnergyPlus code is a large serial F90 code that is being developed at several institutions, including LBL in EETD. I have been tasked with improving the performance and have been trying to gain some of that improvement using OpenMP. The Carver and Hopper machines could be very valuable withthis work as I need to test many different parameters and versions of loop threading over a wide range of input. It is also very nice to have two modern and different CPU's to perform the benchmarks. Currently the focus is one shared memory node.