RayBooster : An efficient, robust, generic and easy to use basic component for high performance radiative simulations

Latest environment concerns and bioclimatic issues are essential in modern building performance simulations. Among those concerns, most of simulations require radiative propagation computation to estimate solar incomes, daylighting, solar panel efficiency, etc. Ray Tracing based methods are a robust approach to radiative simulation. However, a common wisdom is to associate them to slow performances or high demanding computation power. Based on the acquired expertise of HPCSA in terms of research, industrialization and integration of Ray Tracing technologies over the last decade, we introduce a ray tracer named RayBooster. It helps to reduce significantly the per ray cost of simulations. In fact, this innovative basic component allows both to increase the quality of results for the same amount of time, and to shift off-line simulations, which need a lot of time computations, toward a real-time world. In this paper, we briefly describe the RayBooster ray tracer and its advantages in terms of genericity and performances. We then measure its efficiency on practical benchmarks before illustrating its ease of use by providing a RayBooster 4 powered version of the widely used light simulation toolchain named Radiance (Ward 1994). We show that this integration is not only straightforward but also drastically improves both the robustness and the efficiency of this well-tried codebase.