An alternative - numerical simulation on a Raspberry Pi
I have had a R-Pi for 3 months and have been thinking about building EnergyPlus on it. I am a little disappointed for letting the ESP-r team announce it first, even though they've always been a few steps (sometimes decade-long strides) ahead of everyone else on simulation developments - open source, uncertainty analysis, stochastic behaviour models, to name but a few.
At least I can report that E+ CAN be built on R-Pi, although I had to disable all optimization options in the compiler, due to the memory limit. As a result, E+ is practically useless: a 20 second model on a decent laptop will take more than 12 hours to run on the R-Pi! I am sure the official build from the E+ team will be much faster, should they decide to support the platform. Still, what's the point of running simulation on inadequate hardware? Well, there are plenty of reasons, actually... ...
Luckily, all jEPlus tools work flawlessly on R-Pi, including the full-blown optimisation package. You just need to connect your little R-Pi to the internet and send the simulation jobs to a proper computer...
Cheers,
Yi
Dr Yi Zhang
IESD, De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom