Parallelization of modular simulation programs in an object oriented environment: the TRNSYS case

From the observation that existing simulation programs exploit neither the subjacent parallelism in building energy management problems nor parallel computer possibilities, we develop certain principles and apply them to a well-known program, TRNSYS. To this end, we can call on the possibilities offered by object oriented programming, which permits in particular : the easy re-use of the existing programs, the transformation of a module into an independent process, communicating with other processes in a flexible data processing architecture (mono or multiprocessor machines), the display of an execution scheme, common to all the processes of the system; We have developed a compiler which analyses the TRNSYS deck and automatically generates the necessary code for a given simulation. The different levels permitting the communications are writen C++, in an UNIX environment. The old procedures, writen in Fortran, are re-used.