Designing sustainable buildings globally with Hybrid-cloud

YellowDog worked closely with two researchers from UCL, in partnership with Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, to run 354 million discrete simulations of the effect of weather conditions from 500 international locations on a huge library of building characteristics. 

The building industry accounts for 39% of global energy-related carbon emissions. Any sustainable future must find a way to reduce this to zero. Daniel Zepeda-Rivas and Ivan Korolija from UCL have been focused on doing just that, by creating a library of building designs and simulating the effects on them from a wide range of annual weather conditions. Ultimately, FCBStudios will turn this data into a platform which is available across the world, enabling sustainable buildings design in any climate.

As with many research institutions, capacity of on-premise resource is limited and often fully allocated across a range of world-changing projects. In this instance, that meant the scale and timeline of the project were restricted. In December, YellowDog launched a competition in which we offered $500,000 of cloud compute to selected projects focused on Life Sciences innovation or Carbon Impact reduction. Through a partner organisation called See Through News, Daniel and Ivan successfully applied to the competition.

YellowDog’s platform now enabled the team to access all available compute across the world and rapidly. After initial meetings, both parties were excited about the potential impact of working together and the project team decided to expand their research (by 140 million simulations), beyond what was initially intended to be a resource for UK firms building internationally. Daniel remarked “the possibility to use cloud computing changes the whole timing of the project. Instead of thinking about carrying out a reduced version of the analysis over the next months now we are thinking about a much bigger and more ambitious experimental campaign that can be carried out in weeks”.

The team used EnergyPlus, a whole building energy simulation application, modelling detailed building characteristics (708,588 files) and weather conditions (500 international locations) to simulate building design for every set of building and weather condition. 354 million discrete simulations were performed in the cloud on OCI E4 Flex VMs (virtual machines) powered by AMD EPYC processors with 64 OCPUs (128vCPUs) and 64GB RAM, consuming 45,000 instance hours of compute concurrently across five cloud regions in North America and Europe.

Over the course of 11 calendar days, the full simulation was completed with less than 0.6% failure rate (which were detected by YellowDog automatically and successfully retried), with the entire simulation creating 37.5TB of data which will now underpin the low-carbon design solutions shared through the open platform. This has drastically accelerated the research (by months) and will potentially have a lasting impact the timeline of international sustainability efforts. If this impact was scaled across research fields, institutions and continents, the potential to accelerate the human race’s understanding of the world is endless.

Often projects of this nature are somewhat sporadic in the use of compute and therefore it’s difficult for academic institutions to purchase enough on-premise machines to satisfy all researchers at once. Therefore, by using a Hybrid-cloud setup and accessing available (and often idle) compute across the world, this can be scaled and accelerated. Organisations often require help getting to Hybrid-cloud or Multi-cloud capability, opting to avoid lengthy on-boarding and knowledge intensive processes.

As demonstrated by the nature of this project’s completion, YellowDog’s expert team can rapidly onboard teams and simulations of this type on the platform, enabling world-leading scale and execution. In the case of Daniel and Ivan, enabling the global propagation of the knowledge required to build sustainable buildings, anywhere.

For any research teams that would like a free compute consultation with YellowDog to see how you could optimise your workload, get in touch with our team today.

Next week we’ll be at ISC 2023 to showcase how our platform helps optimise compute workloads in AI, Engineering, Finance, Life Sciences and Research. Visit stand A117 or contact our team using the link above.