Hi Antoine,
No problem sharing at all! The work presented at PLEA has actually progressed quite a bit further in the months since we submitted the paper, so I’ll answer as it pertains to the original paper as well as the current state of development:
- For the method detailed in the paper we were using a single Azure VM running Ubuntu and then SSH’ing a series of radiance commands via a local python script. I’ve since written a tool using the Azure Python api to instantiate ‘n’ number of VM’s referencing a predefined custom Ubuntu image (with all the necessary software pre-installed) so we can split up our calculations and run things a bit faster. But to answer the original question: no, Docker was not used.
- Azure Batch is really intriguing and we actually just started looking into it. However, for the time being, all the logic is custom written on our end to manage the collection of virtual machines as well as how all the data gets uploaded, subdivided and calculated. We’re currently using the standard multiprocessing library for task management but will be switching to asyncio pretty soon to improve the performance.
- All post processing to get the metrics was also done on the Azure machine.
- The only parallel benchmarking tests I have that include cost were done for annual DGP calcs instead of a grid-based study, but the cost is very reasonable all things considered. For example, running an annual DGP study with 100 virtual machines took a total of 24 minutes and cost us roughly $1.48. The method demonstrated in the paper was only using one virtual machine for about 14 hours straight. I believe the hardware configuration was set to an ‘H’ series profile which would pencil out to around $30-40 for each run.
- That’s a tough one. The LINE studio at HKS has an interest in building out a custom cloud pipeline for use in a variety of other tasks with daylight simulation being just one of them. So in our case it makes sense to spend the time to build it out, but yes in the current state it also requires a fair amount of specialty knowledge just to turn the thing on and start getting results. We’re planning on building out a simplified UI and making it available to our firm but it might be a while before we get to that point. However, in most scenarios I think it makes a lot sense for this type of thing to be a service that gets contracted out.
- Right around Windows ME
. Grasshopper did not like that mesh one bit, but that rendering was actually done in 3ds Max. We built a plugin to visualize Rhino mesh colors in Max based off a method proposed several years ago on the Grasshopper forums
Hope that helps!
-Paul