What’s new in buildstockbatch v2023.11.0

About this Document

This document describes changes between buildstockbatch version 2022.10.0 and buildstockbatch version v2023.11.0

General

This version should be backwards compatible with previous versions of buildstockbatch.

See v2023.11.0 Changelog for details of this change.

Kestrel Availability

This version adds support for Kestrel. See the sections on installation and configuration for details.

Most users will be able to migrate their project files by adding a kestrel top level key, which can be copied and modified from the eagle configuration.

kestrel:
  n_jobs: 10
  minutes_per_sim: 0.8
  account: your_account
  sampling:
    time: 30
  postprocessing:
    time: 30
    n_workers: 4

You will want to decrease the kestrel.n_jobs and kestrel.postprocessing.n_workers values by a factor of ~2.8 because the Kestrel compute nodes have 104 cores whereas the Eagle nodes only had 36. As such you should generally need fewer Kestrel nodes to do the same work in the same time.

We’re using python’s venv for environment management instead of conda on Kestrel. That means that activating the environment will be slightly different:

module load python
source /kfs2/shared-projects/buildstock/envs/buildstock-20XX.XX.X/bin/activate

Calling buildstockbatch uses the buildstock_kestrel command line interface is very similar to Eagle. A few of the optional args were renamed in this version for consistency.

AWS Keys on Kestrel and Eagle

You no longer need to manage AWS keys on Kestrel or Eagle. A service account has been created for each and the software knows where to find those keys.

Schema Updates

The kestrel key was added to the schema. See Kestrel Availability for details.