RE: [EnergyPlus_Support] E+ System Requirements

JRR wrote;

Energy Plus is single threaded code. I understand from monitoring the mailing lists and
responses over the last 3+ years that it is mostly FORTRAN or rewritten FORTRAN
with object oriented constructs. As such a dual core CPU will help some but not a lot.

The best machine to get in our opinion is a roughly 3 year old XEON with dual CPU
sockets on the motherboard. The motherboard will be a 533 or 667 Mhz board with
DDR-333 memory sticks. The outstanding part is that the XEON HT CPUs came in
3.2 Ghz, 3.6 Ghz, and 3.8 Ghz. versions. The Intel SE7525GP2 motherboard has
PCI express x16 graphics card slot, 2x PCI 64, 3x PCI 32, 2x ATA-100 and 2x SATA I.
There is an onboard hardware RAID chip that has drivers for both Windows XP Pro and
Linux. That means you can have a dual boot, dual RAID system.....

We are currently running an Adaptec 29160 SCSI card with a Seagate Ultra SCSI
Cheetah 10k RPM as the boot disk. We have dual LG DVD+- RW drives with each one
set to different regions. Both SuSE Linux 11.0 and Win XP Pro show 4 cores running at
3.6+ Ghz. The drawback is heat. A 650W power supply will just barely boot our system,
and the CPUs reject 130W EACH at stock speed. All this takes some considerable
effort to run.

A simple, rugged and effective machine would be an Intel DP35DP motherboard, Core 2
Duo CPU at 3.0 Ghz, 2GB or 4GB memory, 2x SATA 2 hard disk, 2x DVD+- RW,
floppy drive, NVIDIA Quadro 1700 PCIe video card. Get a chassis with lots of room -
mid-tower or full tower and a 400 w + power supply. Microsoft is still selling Win XP Pro
to small independent computer shops for another 6 ? weeks, but has already stopped
supply to larger Computer sellers, at least in the US. Now you have a machine with
XP Pro, Vista ( if you really want to ) and SuSE Linux operating system choices.
The Quadro 1700 video card supports the 'CUDA project bringing 192 parallel GPUs
to the compute side of the machine in the next year.....

Yuen Liu wrote:

I can confirm that the EPlus Ver.2.2 can run on WindowsME with 64MB RAM and a Pentium I 166MHz processor, because I am still using such an antique.

However, the speed is about 2 sec. per line of calculation. To do a 4 timestep, 2 DesignDays simulation will take about 2 X 4 x 24 x 2 sec. = 384 sec. That is, about 7 minutes to run a typical 5Z example.

It would take less than 30 seconds on the 1.6GHz PC. RAM size and dual core do not seem to make much difference in processing speed.

If you are just starting, a slow PC is still workable. You will generate the complete set of files for the DesignDays simulation and get the feel of running the simulation and study the results. You can read the PDF document files and print the relavent topics with a slow PC.

EPlus will run from WIndows'98SE to Windows Vista, PC OS.

Dr. Li

To: EnergyPlus_Support@yahoogroups.com
From: leeed2001@gmail.com
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:35:45 -0600
Subject: Re: [EnergyPlus_Support] E+ System Requirements

I don't know that there is a hard set of requirements or recommendations, but here is my experience:

For running single simulations at a time, my 3 yr old laptop w/ 1.66GHz single core processor and 1GB RAM runs just fine.
My work laptop where I constantly run dual simulations concurrently has a dual core processor and 3GB RAM and does quite nice for me.

I think it is fair to say that E+ won't be affected by the graphics engine, as it is solely a command line engine. However, if you are going to run a GUI such as DesignBuilder than you may want to look at the specific GUI recommendations.

Edwin

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 9:19 PM, pohkhai84 <ng_khai@hotmail.com> wrote:

Dear All,

I am intending to download E+ and learn it to do some energy
simulations. Before I download into my computer, is there any where I
can find the minimum system requirement that is required in order for
E+ to run smoothly (ie. CPU speed, ram, graphics, etc)... I am hoping
that my laptop of 3 years is able to run E+ smoothly. If not, I might
have to rely on my desktop at home instead.

Thanks! :)

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