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Acceleration of Radiance for Lighting Simulation by using Parallel Computing with OpenCL

Publication Type

Conference Paper

Date Published

11/2011

Authors

Zuo, Wangda, Andrew McNeil, Michael Wetter, Eleanor S Lee

Abstract

This study attempted to accelerate annual daylighting simulations for fenestration systems in Radiance ray-tracing program. The algorithm was optimized to reduce both the redundant data input/output operations and floating-point operations. To further accelerate the simulation speed, calculation for matrices multiplications was implemented in parallel on a graphics processing unit using OpenCL, a cross-platform parallel programming language. Numerical experiments show that combination of above measures can speed up the annual daylighting simulations 101.7 times or 28.6 times when sky vector has 146 or 2306 elements, respectively.

Journal

12th International Conference of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (Building Simulation 2011)

Year of Publication

2011