mplex the models are. If we are running multi-room E+ studies, that will take far longer to calculate.
Rhino/Grasshopper = <1%
Generating Radiance .ill files = 88%
Processing .ill files into DA, etc. = ~2%
E+ = 10%
Parallelizing Grasshopper:
My first instinct is to avoid this problem by running GH on one computer only. Creating the batch files is very fast. The trick will be sending the radiance and E+ batch files to multiple computers. Perhaps a “round-robin” approach could send each iteration to another node on the network until all iterations are assigned. I have no idea how to do that but hope that it is something that can be executed within grasshopper, perhaps a custom code module. I think GH can set a directory for Radiance and E+ to save all final files to. We can set this to a local server location so all runs output to the same location. It will likely run slower than it would on the C:drive, but those losses are acceptable if we can get parallelization to work.
I’m concerned about post-processing of the Radiance/E+ runs. For starters, Honeybee calculates DA after it runs the .ill files. This doesn’t take very long, but it is a separate process that is not included in the original Radiance batch file. Any other data manipulation we intend to automatically run in GH will be left out of the batch file as well. Consolidating the results into a format that Design Explorer or Pollination can read also takes a bit of post-processing. So, it seems to me that we may want to split up the GH automation as follows:
Initiate
Parametrically generate geometry
Assign input values, material, etc.
Generate radiance/ E+ batch files for all iterations
Calculate
Calc separate runs of Radiance/E+ in parallel via network clusters. Each run will be a unique iteration.
Save all temp files to single server location on server
Post Processing
Run a GH script from a single computer. Translate .ill files or .idf files into custom metrics or graphics (DA, ASE, %shade down, net solar gain, etc.)
Collect final data in single location (excel document) to be read by Design Explorer or Pollination.
The above workflow avoids having to parallelize GH. The consequence is that we can’t parallelize any post-processing routines. This may be easier to implement in the short term, but long term we should try to parallelize everything.
Parallelizing EnergyPlus/Radiance:
I agree that the best way to enable large numbers of iterations is to set up multiple unique runs of radiance and E+ on separate computers. I don’t see the incentive to split individual runs between multiple processors because the modular nature of the iterative parametric models does this for us. Multiple unique runs will simplify the post-processing as well.
It seems that the advantages of optimizing matrix based calculations (3-5 phase methods) are most beneficial when iterations are run in series. Is it possible for multiple iterations running on different CPUs to reference the same matrices stored in a common location? Will that enable parallel computation to also benefit from reusing pre-calculated information?
Clustering computers and GPU based calculations:
Clustering unused computers seems like a natural next step for us. Our IT guru told me that we need come kind of software to make this happen, but that he didn’t know what that would be. Do you know what Penn State uses? You mentioned it is a text-only Linux based system. Can you please elaborate so I can explain to our IT department?
Accelerad is a very exciting development, especially for rpict and annual glare analysis. I’m concerned that the high quality GPU’s required might limit our ability to implement it on a large scale within our office. Does it still work well on standard GPU’s? The computer cluster method can tap into resources we already have, which is a big advantage. Our current workflow uses image-based calcs sparingly, because grid-based simulations gather the critical information much faster. The major exception is glare. Accelerad would enable luminance-based glare metrics, especially annual glare metrics, to be more feasible within fast-paced projects. All of that is a good thing.
So, both clusters and GPU-based calcs are great steps forward. Combining both methods would be amazing, especially if it is further optimized by the computational methods you are working on.
Moving forward, I think I need to explore if/how GH can send iterations across a cluster network of some kind and see what it will take to implement Accelerad. I assume some custom scripting will be necessary.…
ou will see all of the available components on a ribbon at once so there is no need to keep clicking drop down menus.
It's all about discoverability with GH. What if you're a beginner and don't know about the Create Facility (dbl click canvas) how can you find Extr?
Even if you hover over every component or use the drop down lists you will not see the name Extr appear anywhere.
Sure it makes sense that Extr is short for Extrude but it's also the Nick Name of Extrude to Point component
So you can easily miss the fact that one has a Distance Input verses a Point Input.
I think I made the move to Icons around about the move from version 0.5 to 0.6, possibly before. I initially thought that I would go back to text because I loved the mono chromatic look of the text but I soon realised that Icons were the way forward. The greatest benefit is speed. You don't need to digest and decipher every component (which is written 90 degrees to the norm).
I'm not saying you should move to Icons forthwith but at least consider that once you have a better knowledge and understanding of GH, Icons will set you free.
My top ten tips that I would highly recommend to anyone wanting to better themselves with GH.
1) Turn on Draw Icons
2) Turn on Draw Fancy Wires
3) Turn on Obscure Components
4) Use the Create Facility like a Command Line eg "Slider=-1<0.75<2" or "Shiftlist=-1"
5) Use Component Aliases to customise your use of the Create Facility eg giving the Point XYZ component an alias of XYZ will bring it up as the first option on the Create Facility as opposed to the other possibilities.
6) Try to answer other people's questions even if it's not relevant to your own area. By looking into solving a problem outside of your comfort zone and then posting your results it is very rewarding but it also lets you see the other approaches that get posted in a new light.
7) Take the time to understand Data/Path structures.
8) Buy a second monitor - There is nothing that can compare to real estate when working in Grasshopper.
9) Read Rajaa Issa's Essential Mathematics
10) Pick a panel in a tab on the ribbon and get to know every component inside and out and then move on. Start with the Sets Tab > List Panel…
eventually found out about genetic algorithms on which I found extensive researches, projects,... ! I looked into it and ended up on a few papers which I believe are the jumpstart for my master thesis.
"Galapagos; on the logic and limitations of generic solvers" by David RuttenArticle in Architectural Design 83(2) March 2013
"Black-box optimisation methods for architectural design" by Thomas Wortmann and Giacomo NanniciniConference Paper: CAADRIA 2016, At Melbourne, AU, Volume: 177-186
So I started looking into alternatives to genetic algorithms in architectural design.So far, I've ended up on :
Thomas Wortmann's work with the surrogate(or model) based optimization approach!You can check out the tool he developped for GH (Opossum):http://www.food4rhino.com/app/opossum-optimization-solver-surrogate-models
Judyta Cichocka's work, specially with the Swarm approachYou can check out the tool she developped for GH (Silvereye):http://www.food4rhino.com/app/silvereye-pso-based-solver
And that's it !!! I've been researching through article references (mainly on "researchgate") but I'm now stuck in a loop of references I already visited!That probably means the litterature on the subject is not (yet) extended but I might probably be missing something.The keywords make it difficult to search : "optimisation", "algorithms", "architecture", send me most of the time to computational engineering and deep mathematics papers I unfortunately do not have the background knowledge to comprehend ! So there it is ! If you have any clue of where (or how ! ) I should be looking, please tell me :)I know Mr Rutten is pretty active on the forum so hopefully... (fingers crossed :p) !Also if you have any good tips for getting into algorithms in general (you think could help), I'd be glad to hear(read) it ! A book, tutorials maybe ?!So, autors, architects, projects books, articles, conferences I should go to,specialized architecture offices/studios (I'm also looking for an internship so ...).If you know about a more appropriate forum please let me know !If you want to get deeper into this, you can contact me at :
e1635331@student.tuwien.ac.at
tdissaux@student.ulg.ac.be
My master thesis is due for may 2018 but I have a paper to write for January 2018 in order to be elligible for a PHD program afterwards.What I mean by that is that if you read this message in 6 month, I'll still be open to discussion !
I am right now an erasmus student at TUWien (Vienna) but my main university is The university of Liège in Belgium.I can handle French, English, Italian litterature and eventually Dutch if really you think it's worth it ! I have access to most online libraries via my university's portals so access shouldn't be an issue !I'm very excited to hear from you I wish you all a great day,Cheers,Thomas
…
onents (radiation, sunlight-hours and view analysis) which let you study the effect of the orientation of your building and the analysis result. When you come to a question similar to "what is the orientation that the building receives the most/least amount of radiation?" is probably the right time to use this component.
HOW?
I'll try to explain the steps using a simple example. Here is my design geometries. The building in the center is the building to be designed and the rest of the buildings are context. I want to see the effect of orientation on the amount of the radiation on the test building surfaces from the start of Oct. to the end of Feb. for Chicago.
First I need to set up the normal radiation analysis and run it for the building as it is right now. [I'm not going to explain how you can set up this since you can find it in the sample file (Download the sample file from here)]
Now I need to set up the parameters for orientation study using orientationStudyPar component. You can find it under the Extra tab:
At minimum I need to input the divisionAngle, and the totalAngle and set runTheStudy to True. In this case I put 45 for divisionAngle and 180 for the totalAngle which means I want the study to be run for angles 0, 45, 90, 135 and 180.
[Note1: The divisionAngle should be divisible by totalAngle.]
[Note 2: If you don't provide any point for the basePoint, the component will use the center of the geometry as the center of the rotation.]
[Note 3: You can also rotate the context with the geometry! Normally you don't have the chance to change the context to make your design work but if you got lucky the rotateContext input is for you! Set it to True. The default is set to False.]
You're all set for the orientation study, just connect the orientationStudyPar output to OrientationStudyP input in the component and wait for the result!
The component will run the study for all the orientations and preview the latest geometry. To see the result just grab a quick graph and connect it to totalRadiation. As you can see in the graph 135 is the orientation that I receive the maximum radiation. Dang!
If you want to see all the result geometries set bakeIt to True, and the result will be baked under LadyBug> RadaitionStudy>[projectname]> . The layer name starts with a number which is the totalRadiation.
Mostapha…
her people) a tremendous amount of time creating them by hand. Dog Treat was far from perfect, however it was good enough to use almost daily.
Three years is a long time. Since 2016 my Gh knowledge has expanded and I’ve seen how dodgy some of the scripting is. With this in mind I started work on a new build. Many things have been tweaked and some things have been rebuilt from the ground up.
Everything has been designed to be leaner and be a general solution to the problem of creating dog bone corners on geometry for quick, efficient and safe CNC fabrication.
Some of these things are:
Adding prompts about user geometry to make them aware about open curves, varying curve heights and if their geometry had been altered (mostly removing unnecessary points on curves).
Smooth Transfers. If you’re in a rush and need to speed through cutting, smooth transfers mean that a lead in geometry is now created alongside the actual dog bone arc. This means the router bit doesn’t have to come to a minute stop at every corner. This is turned on by default.
Acute Angle Condition If the angle between the two curves adjacent to a dog bone point is acute, previously the dog bone corner was useless. This was because the distance between the end points of the dog bone arc were less than the diameter of the router bit. There are many ways this condition could be addressed. I chose to circumscribe a larger arc based on the original angle between the adjacent curves. While it removes more material from the corner, it minimises tool wear and any potential for material to burn.
Single Curve A single curve can now be input into Dog Treat. It will be output with both internal and external treatments.
I’ll continue to update Dog Treat as the need arises, it’s become somewhat of a hobby now. Maybe one day it will become part of a Plug-in… once I learn to code it though!
Happy Treating!
Hi Everyone,
Here's a tool I've been working on for the past 4 months or so in my free time. It's a dog bone corner generator, however it's a little different to some of the existing ones. It's designed to be used for large amounts of geometry and as such, it avoids using any curve boolean operations that are computationally taxing. You don't have to split your curves up into internal and external lots either, it works it all out so you can be lazy. I've also incorporated Lunch Box's Object Bake Component for a one click operation that bakes geometry back out to Internal and External profile layers.
Let me know how it goes, will update where necessary.
Best,
Darcy
Change Log
06/11/19 - Version 2.0 SECOND DINNER - Rebuild
29/09/17 - Version 1.3 - Now with smooth corners option, True for smooth default/False for original
18/05/17 - Version 1.2 - Now includes variable angle domain input (defaults at 90°) for angled corners
13/11/16 - slight change to enable acceptance of very large interior curves
…
Added by Darcy Zelenko at 8:44pm on November 9, 2016
it seems that was this. Now all is working fine !
Glad that it worked! But I am still a bit worried. Gismo components only modify the gdal-data/osmconf.ini file and no other MapWinGIS file. So your MapWinGIS installation files should not be compromised. The fact that you did not get the "COM CLSID" error message when running the "Gismo Gismo" component suggests that MapWinGIS has been properly installed. So I wonder if the cause for the permanent "invalid shapes" warning has again something with the fact that your system is again not allowing the MapWinGIS to properly edit the osmconf.ini. Maybe this problem will appear again, and again, and reinstallation of MapWinGIS every time can be somewhat bothersome.
- About the terrain generation, is it possible to have the texture from google or other provider mapped onto the terrain surface from gismo component ? (Same as using the ladybug terrain generator in fact). I try to used the image extracted by ladybug component and then applied it to the gismo terrain but the texture is rotated by 90°.
The issue with the rotation can be solved by swapping/reversing the U,V directions of the terrain surface. A slightly more important issue is that terrain surface generated with Gismo "Terrain Generator" component might have a bit smaller radius than what the radius_ input required. This stems from the fact that the terrain data first needs to be downloaded in geographic coordinate system, and then projected. Some projecting issues may occur at the very edges of the projected terrain, so I had to slightly cut out the very edges of the terrain which results in the actual terrain diameters being slightly shorted in both directions. This means that if you apply the same satellite image from Ladybug "Terrain Generator" component to Gismo "Terrain Generator" component the results may not be the same.I attached below a python component which tries to solve this issue by extending the edges of Gismo "Terrain Generator" terrain, and then cutting them with the cuboid of the exact dimensions as the radius_ input. Have in mind that this extension of the original terrain at its edges is not a correct representation of the actual terrain in that location. But rather just an extension of the isoparameteric curve of the terrain surface. So basically: some 0 to 10% (0 to 10 percent of the width and length) of the terrain around all four edges is not the actual terrain for that location, but rather just its extension.The python component is located at the very right of the definition attached below.
Also, if you would like to use the satellite images from Ladybug "Terrain Generator" component along with "OSM shapes", sometimes you may find slight differences in position of the shapes. This is due to openstreetmap data not being based on Google Maps (that's what Ladybug "Terrain Generator" component is using), but rather on Bing, MapQuest and a few others.
- About the requiredKeys_ input of OSM shapes, I understand what you mean and your advice, but in most cases I use it, the component was working fine even without input. I think it's better to extract all tags, values and keys of the selected area, instead of searching for specific ones as I try to find all data related to what I want after, isn't it ? To check what keys are present on the area also.
Ineed, you are correct.I though you were trying to only create a terrain, 3d buildings and maybe find some school or similar 3d building, for these two locations. The recommendation I mentioned previously is due to shapefiles having a limit (2044) to how many keys it can contain. This requires further testing of some big cities locations with maybe larger radii, which I haven't performed due to my poor PC configuration. But in theory, I imagine that it may happen that a downloaded .osm file may have more than 2044 keys. In that case shapefile will only record 2044 of them, and disregard the others. That was my point.But again 2044 is a lot of keys, and I haven't been checking much this in practice. For example, when I set the radius_ to 1000 meters, and use your "3 Rue de Bretonvilliers Paris" location I get around 350 something keys, which is way below the 2044.Another reason why one should use the requiredKeys_ input is to make the Gismo OSM components run quicker: for example, the upper mentioned 350 something keys will result in 350 values for each branch of the "OSM shapes" component's "values" output.Which means if you have 10 000 shapes, the "OSM shapes" component will have 10 000 branches with 350 items on each branch (values). This can make all Gismo OSM components very heavy, and significantly elongate the calculation process.With requiredKeys_ input you may end up with only a couple of tens of items per each branch.Sorry for the long reply.…
Added by djordje to Gismo at 8:57am on June 11, 2017
This blog post is a rough approximation of the lecture I gave at the AAG10 conference in Vienna on September 21st 2010. Naturally it will be quite a different experience as the medium is quite…
Added by David Rutten at 3:27pm on September 24, 2010