@chriswmackey @mostapha
Apologizes if I missed this in the documentation or on discourse, I’m curious how OS measures are run within a pollination recipe.
Are measures being run with OpenStudio server or is it just an environment which executes a OpenStudio workflow (OSW), is there any information or Github repo which you can point me to about this environment? I’m looking to learn as much as possible about it.
Also how many workflows can this environment run simultaneously?
Thanks!
Hi @antonszilasi! Great to see you here. 
It is the latter. We don’t use OpenStudio server. Is it something that is required for your workflows?
The best place for you to learn about how measures are executed is to check the annual-energy-use recipe and in particular the simulate model step which uses this function. You can see the command there which is a honeybee-energy command which you should be able to find on GitHub.
Back to how we execute the commands. They are being executed inside a docker image. In this case honeybee-energy:
https://hub.docker.com/r/ladybugtools/honeybee-energy/tags?page=1&ordering=last_updated
It depends on how many CPUs you want to pay for! Pollination uses K8s under the hood which allows us to scale as much as needed. Do you have a particular number in mind?
@mostapha
Thanks for the reply and sorry for my slow reply.
I just ran my first simple simulation with pollination I hopped back into Grasshopper after a 4 year absence!
Its really cool what you’ve done.
I’m now brainstorming whether we could use the pollination backend since it would be easier for most people to use our GUI to build up models.
Do you have some info about just using the pollination API that you can share with me?
Basically we would be submitting OpenStudio workflows with several measures, we actually use a measure to run radiance since OpenStudio server accommodates this now as of 3.1.0.
So I think we would just have a single recipe which we would use.
Do you have any estimates on pricing? Would pricing be per simulation hour?
At the moment I am still trying to get the OpenStudio server 3.2.0 k8 version working with 300 runs running simultaneously I’m still working with NREL to do this.
I’m just curious why did you decide to not use OpenStudio server I guess that much be a plethora of reasons?
Hi @antonszilasi! No worries. I’m happy that you finally ran your first simulation.
Your simulations are failing because the size of the model is too small for OpenStudio. You had to change the model units to meters or change the input numbers to get a valid model.
You can see this error under the debug tab.
Here is the API documentation: https://api.pollination.cloud/
Here is a post that shows how one can use it: guides/getting-started at master · pollination/guides · GitHub
We have to make some adjustments to support this since currently the image that runs OpenStudio doesn’t have Radiance as a dependency. Is it the default OpenStudio measure? I personally think there are better ways than using the Radiance measure on Pollination to run your daylight studies in scale.
I’ll share our current pricing with you via a message.
You can run those 300 runs on Pollination right now with no issues.
That will be a very long answer but here are the most important ones:
You may want to watch this presentation about the big picture decisions behind building Pollination and why it is built this way:
We are also introducing Pollination apps which will make building UIs on top of the Pollination API easy and straightforward. Are you still using floorspace.js for building the input model? We might be able to integrate this directly into Pollination Apps by building a Streamlit component for floorspace.js.
