Kitware Collaborates with NREL on Software Process for Radiance Project

Kitware is starting a new collaborative effort with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a facility of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), on implementing important back-end software processes for the Radiance Project.

Originally developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) under DOE funding, Radiance provides lighting engineers and researchers worldwide with physically-based simulation tools for daylighting, electric lighting and energy analysis of buildings. The project’s principal author was Greg Ward of Anyhere Software, who continues to provide oversight to the project’s evolution.

CMake was implemented by Kitware and NREL as part of their efforts to incorporate Radiance-based simulation capabilities within OpenStudio, NREL’s own open-source suite of software tools. The use of CMake for Radiance will allow for nightly building and testing of the Radiance HEAD release and will provide automatic updates of any detected build or testing errors.

“This latest project is yet another demonstration of CMake’s ability to deliver a flexible, cross-platform solution that can manage the software build process,” said Bill Hoffman, CTO at Kitware and a primary developer of CMake. “The Radiance project provides Kitware with another opportunity to collaborate and deliver the necessary open-source tools that other companies and government agencies are looking to integrate within their existing systems.”

CMake was created by Kitware in 2000 with funding from the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It was developed in response to a need for a powerful build environment for the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK).

Kitware also contributed a new Qt-based graphical user interface for the Radiance Scene Viewer that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Both of these contributions enable a wider scope of researchers to access and use Radiance, either on their own or through OpenStudio. With these new implementations, NREL is encouraging more developers and users to take part in the Radiance project and contribute their own systems to the dashboard in order to create a diverse testing environment.