Solea Urban Technical Details

17 Mar Solea Urban Technical Details

SOLEA URBAN is a UNIX powered software program which simulates the three-dimensional ray tracing and shadow casting for rooftop solar photovoltaic energy estimations in real-time. It exploits an advanced processing architecture based on cloud supercomputing, graphic creation platforms, fast radiative transfer modelling and Earth Observation data sources. A dedicated open access application in the form of a solar cadaster tool for the city of Athens in Greece can be found in the following URL: https://solea.gr/athens-solar-cadastre/

Software and hardware requirements:

UNIX Standard V7 aligned with the single specification V4 2018 edition
LibRadtran library for radiative transfer V2.0.4 (C++ edition)
Unreal Engine 5 powered by NVIDIA RTX real-time ray tracing rendering
128-core CPU with message passing interface (C++)
10K CUDA-core GPU with application programming interface (C++)
2 Tb RAM and 12Tb RAID10 on operating mode

The conceptualization and development of the SOLEA URBAN software program received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors and part of the technical background logic is documented in the following DOIs:

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-11-907-2018 (section 2.2)

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-14-5657-2021 (section 2.2)