Tools for Energy Model Optimization and Analysis (Temoa)

On October 20th, the NC State University Libraries is hosting an Energy Week presentation on Energy Systems Modeling with High Performance Computing Resources. (See the following regstration link.)

In this presentation, Dr. Joseph DeCarolis, Professor in the Department of Construction, Civil, and Environmental Engineering at NC State, will highlight ongoing work using Tools for Energy Model Optimization and Analysis (Temoa), an open source energy system optimization model developed at NC State that is designed to conduct rigorous uncertainty analysis and make use of high-performance computing resources.

HPC users can try Temoa for themselves on the Henry2 cluster, following these instructions.

Step 1: Get HPC access

If you do not have HPC access, see the following following instructions for getting access, and sign up for a workshop on basic use of the cluster.

Step 2: Get Temoa

Copy from HPC:

For a quick test drive of Temoa, get the code by copying the tar file that is (temporarily) stored on the HPC. Copy it to your share directory and untar, then cd to the Temoa directory:

cd /share/$GROUP/$USER
cp /usr/local/usrapps/solvers/temoa.tar .
tar -xvf temoa.tar
cd temoa

Use GitHub:

When moving on to using Temoa in your own research, get the latest version from GitHub by doing the following. Install in /usrapps, the space for user installed software.

cd /usr/local/usrapps/$GROUP/
git clone https://github.com/TemoaProject/temoa/
cd temoa

Using git clone gives the latest version. Starting from the latest stable (tagged) version is generally a best practice for a basic user.

git tag
git checkout v1.6.0

Step 3: Set the environment

Temoa has several dependencies. HPC has used Conda to install the environment as explained in the Temoa documentation. You can set the environment from Temoa by doing

conda activate /usr/local/usrapps/solvers/temoa/env_1.6.0

To exit the Temoa environment, do

conda deactivate

Step 4: Run Temoa

To run Temoa, use this Video Tutorial on Running Temoa from the Command Line. Please watch the video, as Temoa is described in the video, but this page only contains the commands needed to run on HPC. See also the official documentation on running Temoa.

The most notable difference between using the Video Tutorial and using HPC is that you must request an interactive session so that Temoa is not running on a login node. The other two differences are that the example will not use CPLEX on HPC, and some of the directories have alternate names.

Request an interactive session that uses 1 core on a compute node for 20 minutes. Set the environment for the interactive session.

bsub -Is -n 1 -W 20 bash
conda activate /usr/local/usrapps/solvers/temoa/env_1.6.0

To run the test, do

python temoa_model/ data_files/utopia-15.dat
[you will be prompted to press enter]

The output should approximately match with the video.

That's it! To exit the interactive session, type exit.

Next Steps

For more information on Temoa, see:
• Main site
• Official documentation
• Video tutorials