Project EnergyPlus Cloud Now Available on Autodesk Labs

Here's a question you never ask yourself:

• Have I googled too much today?

You never ask that. Anytime you want to search for something on the web, you type in some text into the address window and hit return. It's Google's problem to have enough servers on hand to satisfy your insatiable search requests. You just want a list of URLs related to the text, so it never occurs to you that you may be using the service too often.

That's sort of how Autodesk has been pitching cloud computing. In fact we refer to it as infinite computing. We have the servers. You subscribe to A360 and our cloud-based solutions. You would never buy something like 6,000 computers for your visualization, analysis, simulation, and collaboration needs, but you might be willing to use 6,000 computers for an hour or so. So that's the pitch.

We have a technology preview where the software runs in the cloud instead of on your desktop. The result is supposed to be better performance. You can tell us if our heads are in the clouds or not.

Complete a short survey to request participation in the project.

Project EnergyPlus Cloud is our free technology preview for running EnergyPlus simulations in the cloud faster than on an average desktop computer. EnergyPlus is the most advanced whole building energy simulation program that engineers, architects, and researchers use to model energy and water use in buildings. EnergyPlus is widely used for high performance building design, code compliance, and evaluation of advanced energy efficiency measures. The project goals include: providing rapid analysis results for EnergyPlus annual simulations by several times faster than desktop simulations and managing the EnergyPlus run process in the cloud without requiring any local computing resources.

We are eager to hear your feedback. You can reach us at [email protected].

Cloud computing is alive in the lab.