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At least 1,207 records · Page 67

Performance Simulation and Analysis of Occupancy-Based Control for Office Buildings with Variable-Air-Volume Systems

Variable-air-volume (VAV) systems are used in many office buildings. The minimum airflow rate setting of VAV terminal boxes has a significant impact on both energy consumption and indoor air quality. Conventional controls usually have the terminal’s minimum airflow rate at a constant (e.g., 30% or more of the terminal design airflow rate), irrespective of the occupancy status, which may cause problems, such as excessive simultaneous heating and cooling, under ventilation, and thermal comfort issues. This paper examines the potential of energy savings from occupancy-based controls (OBCs). The sensed occupancy information, either occupant presence or people count, is used to determine the airflow rate of terminal boxes, the thermostat setpoints, and the lighting control. Using EnergyPlus, a whole-building energy modeling software, the energy savings of OBC strategies are evaluated for representative existing medium office buildings in the U.S. The simulation results show that the conventional OBC, based on occupant presence sensing, can save 8% of whole-building energy use in Miami (hot climate) for systems without air-side economizer and about 13% in both Baltimore (mixed climate) and Chicago (cold climate). Comparatively, the advanced OBC, based on people counting, can save 8% in Miami to 23% in Baltimore for systems with economizers. The outdoor-air fraction of the supply air from air-handling units significantly affects the potential energy savings from the advanced OBC strategy. In addition to energy savings, the advanced OBC satisfies the zone ventilation during all occupied hours over the whole year.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATION PERFORMANCE DEGRADATION OF THE RADIATION TRANSPORT CODE PIDOTS ON HIGH-UTILIZATION, MULTI-USER HPC SYSTEMS

The PIDOTS radiation transport code implements a spatially decomposed Integral Transport Matrix Method (ITMM) solver, which is intended to fully utilize the capabilities of modern, massively parallel high-performance computing (HPC) systems. While the code shows promising results, there was also an unexpected loss of parallel efficiency on the test systems as the number of participating processors grew and the parallelization grain size got finer. We seek to identify and characterize the communication-latency based effects that contribute to this slowdown. Through the creation of a high-level, parameterized representation of the workload of the code, the communication methodology was identified as the likely reason. From there, low-level, InfiniBand communication performance data measured on the Falcon HPC at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was used to produce a discrete-event model of the communication scheme. The data, as well as the model, show that infrequent, large spikes in send/receive latency drive an unexpectedly substantial increase in projected runtime of a code. Furthermore, these effects are more pronounced under the high-utilization, scattered-workload environment of Falcon. Based on results from the model, it can be shown that a high-communication volume, small message-size regime can easily lead to slowdowns of ~5-10x, when compared to ideal results, as the processor count increases.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗