Where does expandobjects.exe save its temporary files? (Parallel EnergyPlus simulations are crashing)

[Florent-H]

I'm running EnergyPlus in parallel, where each IDF resides in its own directory. I have to run expandobjects.exe with the -x flag for each EnergyPlus simulation, which results in temporary files overwriting themselves somewhere on my disk. Therefore, some .expidf files are not created and my parallel simulations crash.

Where does expandobjects.exe save its temporary files? I would like to make sure that the temporary files are created in separate directories, allowing me to successfully execute EnergyPlus in parallel.

Thank you for any help!

[mjwitte]

I believe it is in the current working directory. The code is here:

EnergyPlus/src/EnergyPlus/CommandLineInterface.cc

Line 661 in 403d65c

if (runExpandObjects) {

Expandobjects expects input/output to be in the current working directory. That's why when using EP-Launch to run multiple simulations, it creates folders Temp0001, Temp0002 and executes from these folders to make sure that there are not file collisions.

I see a couple of options to solve this.

1. Move to a separate temporary directory for each instance and start EnergyPlus with a full path from the unique working directory.
2. Use runepplus.bat instead (located in the EnergyPlus root folder), and you can edit the batch file to give you more control over the workflow. But even with this, you need to make sure that each simulation has it's own working directory.

Please reply here if this works.

[Florent-H]

Thank you for your reply @mjwitte.

Throughout the parallelized workflow, I change the current working directory to the separate isolated directory with the IDF file (solution 1). I am now able to run simulations in parallel!

Thank you again.