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

TitleAcceleration of Radiance for Lighting Simulation by using Parallel Computing with OpenCL
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2011
AuthorsWangda Zuo, Andrew McNeil, Michael Wetter, Eleanor S Lee
Conference Name12th International Conference of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (Building Simulation 2011)
Date Published11/2011
Conference LocationSydney, Australia
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.

LBNL Report Number

LBNL-5049E