Running eppy in a REQ-REP pattern in zeromq

How it works

The REQ-REP pattern is a simple messaging pattern in ZeroMQ. It works this way:

  • The client sends a message to the server

  • the server replies to the client

Running eppy and E+ using this pattern looks like this;

  • read the idf file (idftxt), the weather file (wfiletxt) as text files

  • make a getdict dictionary. This is a definition of what data you want back from the simulation.

    • Maybe I want the 3rd column from the csv file and the second table from the html table file

    • more on this later

  • The client sends the following to the server

    • an id <to keep track fo your runs>

    • idftxt

    • wfiletxt

    • getdict

  • The server will run the idf and return the data defined in getdict

Thats it !

On getdict

Read about getdict in Run and get results This is the documentation of code in the respository https://github.com/pyenergyplus/witheppy

Try it out

Running everything locally

  • run eppyREQclient.py in one terminal

  • run eppyREPserver.py on another terminal

  • You can start them in any order (server first or client first)

Running the server on a remote computer

  • get the ip address of the computer you are using as a server. Let us call it SERVER_IP.

    • the server computer can be on the cloud, as long as the IP is accessible from the client.

    • Or the server can be simply another computer

  • run eppyREPserver.py on the server computer

  • edit eppyREPserver.py by changing the line socket.connect("tcp://localhost:5555") to socket.connect("tcp://SERVER_IP:5555")

  • run eppyREQclient.py on the client computer