Distributed processing and spreadsheet elements

Answered

Follow

Tim Wallis

• August 22, 2019 00:39

Hi all,

I'm looking to reduce the run time of a simulation by using distributed processing. While we don't have the DP licence we can still use 4 DP Clients which should allow us to approximately quarter the run time. However, the model exports a lot of results via a spreadsheet element for post processing. "Save MS-Excel file after simulation' needs to be unchecked in order to complete a DP run.

Is there an alternative way to collect the data and perhaps then manually export the data once the DP run has completed? 

1

• 

  Jason

  • October 01, 2020 20:57
  • Edited

  Tim,

  Thank you for posting a question in our Forum! This is a good question. Is there a chance you can use Time History Result to export results to Excel? If so, you can set it up to not export automatically and then click the "Export Now" button after the DP simulation is complete (see screen capture below). 

  

  Please keep in mind that you need 1 of your processors for the DP Controller so if you have 4 available cores on your machine, please note that you should only use 3 clients. 

  I hope this is helpful,

  Jason

  0

  Comment actions Permalink
• 

  Tim Wallis

  • August 23, 2019 00:32

  Thanks Jason.

  Unfortunately we have too many data points to use time histories efficiently. We're running a 360 hr simulation on an hourly time step with 5776 realisations. We have a total of 110 results exported via a spreadsheet element.  While we can do multiple runs concurrently to reduce the total time, DP might potentially give us an opportunity to reduce the overall run time for each individual run. This is most beneficial when we need a quicker turnaround during testing and setup. Being able to use DP would be nice to have but not having it isn't a show stopper!

  Cheers,

  Tim

  0

  Comment actions Permalink
• 

  Jason

  • August 23, 2019 16:09

  Tim,

  If you need to export a lot of final value results, then another option is the Multi-variate chart, which has a shortcut key option within the table view that generates a tab-delimited file of all the tabular results from a DP run. You can read more about this option here. Will this work for you?

  Jason

  0

  Comment actions Permalink
• 

  David Esh

  • August 23, 2019 16:49

  Tim - I try to avoid the use of spreadsheets for the reason you indicate regarding DP and sometimes it can impact execution time significantly.

  I do a combination of what Jason suggested.  You can add as many time series to a chart as you want (I think, Jason is there a limit?).  Then when your simulation is done just click on the chart, choose table view, and copy and paste your data over to Excel.  I combine that with what Jason suggested for non-time series outputs.  Create a multivariate output with all the inputs and outputs you want, and do the same procedure of grabbing all the data at the end of your calculation and copy and paste to Excel.  If your model takes awhile to run you may want to get a DP license and move beyond the DP lite.  That is what I do and 40 processes makes a big difference over 4 :)

  The other option would be to create a custom DLL to write all of the outputs you want at the end of the simulation to a *.txt, *.csv, etc.

  Regards,

  Dave

  1

  Comment actions Permalink
• 

  Jason

  • November 19, 2019 20:40

  Sorry for the late reply to your questions, Dave. I don't know of any limit to the number of outputs connected to a result. The limiting factor will be the time it takes to open the table view. With a lot of data, this process could take a while. It should be noted that you can add multiple results to a time history chart even if the unit dimensions are not consistent. The table will always show them all. The chart, of course, is limited to just 2 different unit types (for the Y1 and Y2 axes).

  Dave's recommendations are good and probably the most straightforward for what you need to do.

  0

  Comment actions Permalink

Please sign in to leave a comment.