Acceleration of the matrix multiplication of Radiance three phase daylighting simulations with parallel computing on heterogeneous hardware of personal computer

Building designers are increasingly relying on complex fenestration systems (CFS) to reduce energy consumed for lighting and HVAC in low-energy buildings. Radiance, a lighting simulation program, has been used to conduct daylighting simulations for CFS. Depending on the configurations, the simulation can take hours or even days using a personal computer. This paper describes how to accelerate the matrix multiplication portion of a Radiance three-phase daylight simulation by conducting parallel computing on heterogeneous hardware of a personal computer. The algorithm was optimized and the computational part was implemented in parallel using OpenCL. The speed of the new approach was evaluated using various daylighting simulation cases on a multi-core central processing unit (CPU) and a graphics processing unit (GPU). Based on the measurements and analysis of the time usage for the Radiance daylighting simulation, further speedups can be achieved using fast input/output devices and storing the data in a binary format.