Dear fellow building simulation users,

The deadline for submission to the Design Optimisation Competition 2014 (DOC2014, see: http://optimisationcompetition.org) has been extended by a full month, till 30 April. The decision was made on participants? requests, especially from those who have encountered issues with the earlier version of DesginBuilder v4, and could not utilize online simulation resources effectively. A new version of DesignBuilder v4 is now available. I am glad to report that majority of the early issues have been solved in this version.

Using online simulation in DesignBuilder is very simple ? just put in your user name and password the first time you use it and everything is connected. Here are some instructions on how this works: http://optimisationcompetition.org/wiki/doku.php?id=2014:tools. During the competition period (till 30 April), the participants are each given 3,000 hours of free computing time, which worth ?300 ($480), so they can use the full power of the new optimisation tool.

We intend to keep the competition registration open till Tuesday, 1 April. So if you haven?t registered, come grab the last chance of getting the new software and the free computing time. The registration page is http://www.designbuilder.co.uk/content/view/136/206/. You only need to supply your name, email address, organization, and country to register an account.

Best wishes,

Dr Yi Zhang