Using a computational cloud to run simulations

Hello Everyone. Lately I’m finding myself working extensively with Ladybug and honeybee along with octopus to design cost and energy efficient facades and shading elements.

It’s great working with those tools and the results are really interesting.

My only problem is that it takes DAYS for every run and sometimes the computer crashes after a few hours and I have to start again.

So I’m asking here if anyone know of a way to run Rhino/Grasshopper on a computational cloud and run the simulations on a remote and powerful server in order to save time and getting better results.

Can anyone help?

Thank you very much!

If you’re using Ladybug’s radiation analysis you can only run it inside Grasshopper. If you’re using other types of analysis like daylighting and/or energy simulation there are solutions to make it happen but then you most probably have to use some other optimization algorithm other than Octopus. I remember we had a couple of discussions on this topic including this one: Running Honeybee in parallel across multiple computers in a network

@rtamir,

It’s possible to do this with custom code if you have access to cloud computing service. You need to modify HB_RunDaylightAnalysis to package all the required files (batch files?) to send to the cloud to be executed instead of executing them locally. Once you bring them back from the cloud, locate the results files (.ill, ect.) in the normal working directories and the HB modules can pick back up in the normal process. I didn’t develop this custom code, so I can’t help you with the technical aspects of it, but I know it is possible.