The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Homeowners often invest in energy-saving upgrades to make their homes more comfortable and lower their expenses, hoping to see reductions in their upcoming utility bills. Government-backed and utility-backed programs that provide energy-efficient home improvements share the same goal of reducing costs. But measuring the costs and effects of hundreds of different retrofits in thousands of households is a complex process, and the big picture -- which changes should be prioritized for the biggest benefit to the resident -- is difficult to put together. While energy efficiency programs have developed sophisticated models to improve decision making, documented disparities between predicted and realized savings demonstrate that there is still substantial progress that could be made. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), researchers are used to using compute power to dig for answers in piles of untamed data.