Setting Up

Loading the Appropriate Modules

Info

A user can only run PLEXOS with Gurobi solvers on the clusters at this time. Please set up your model accordingly.

PLEXOS XML model files can only run with the Gurobi solver specified while creating the models. The most common combinations you may encounter are

PLEXOS Module	Gurobi Module
plexos/9.000R09	gurobi/9.5.1
plexos/9.200R05	gurobi/10.0.1
plexos/9.200R06	gurobi/10.0.2

Please contact us if you encounter any issues or require a newer version.

Setting up the License

Before we can run PLEXOS, we need to create a license file on the cluster. For this, run the following commands with some minor modifications

EE_reg.xml

mkdir -p ~/.config/PLEXOS
echo '<?xml version="1.0"?>
<XmlRegistryRoot>
  <comms>
    <licServer_IP val="10.60.3.188" />
    <licServer_CommsPort val="399" />
    <licServer_IP_Secondary />
    <connect>
      <PrimaryServer_Port />
      <SecondaryServer_Port />
    </connect>
    <licServer_CommsPort_Secondary />
    <LastLicTypeUsed val="server" />
  </comms>
  <server>
    <licServer_LogFolder val="/tmp/" />
    <licServer_LogEvents val="true" />
  </server>
  <proxy_cred>
    <proxy_ip val="" />
    <proxy_port val="" />
    <proxy_uname val="" />
    <proxy_pass val="" />
  </proxy_cred>
  <BannedList>
    <BanListedMachines val="true" />
  </BannedList>
  <ProductUpdates>
    <LastUpdateDate val="10/10/2021 13:11:10" />
  </ProductUpdates>
  <UserName />
  <Company />
  <UserEmail />
  <CompanyCode />
  <LicenseServerRequestCount />
</XmlRegistryRoot>'   > ~/.config/PLEXOS/EE_reg.xml

Conda environment for PLEXOS with Python and R

1. We need to load a few modules and create the requisite conda environment. First, we need to create a conda environment for PLEXOS.

   module purge
   module load conda
   conda create -n plex1 r-essentials
   

2. Log out and log back in. Load the following modules and activate the conda environment

   module purge
   module load comp-intel intel-mpi mkl conda
   conda activate plex1
   

3. Install additional R libraries using conda

   conda install r-doParallel
   conda install r-RSQLite
   conda install r-testthat
   conda install r-covr
   

   Note

   Most of the R libraries should be added as part of the initial install, but keep an eye out for the following packages.

   Info

   See below if you wish to use your own version of R and Python for PLEXOS.

4. We need to install one, rplexos library from source. To do this, execute the following commands

   mkdir /home/$USER/temporary    
   cd /home/$USER/temporary
   git clone https://github.com/NREL/rplexos.git
   cd rplexos
   CXX=`which icpc` R CMD INSTALL .
   

   Note

   rplexos needs to be built using an Intel compiler and R always wishes to build libraries using the same compilers that was used in its creation. If setting CXX=which icpc shown above does not work, we need to fool R by renaming the intel C++ compiler using a symbolic link. This is a hack and should only be used if the above way of installation fails. In order for the hack run the following after replacing username in the 3rd line with your own username.

   ln -s `which icpc` x86_64-conda_cos6-linux-gnu-c++
   export PATH=`pwd`:$PATH
   Rscript -e  "install.packages('/home/username/temporary/rplexos/',repos=NULL,type='source')"
   rm x86_64-conda_cos6-linux-gnu-c++
   

5. For some PLEXOS examples, we need to install an additional package called plexos-coad. For this run the following

   cd /scratch/$USER
   git clone https://github.com/Computational-Energy/plexos-coad.git
   cd plexos-coad
   
   #patch for python 3.9
   tofix=`grep -lr getchild`
   for f in $tofix ; do sed -i3x "s/for el_data in elem.getchildren()/for el_data in list\(elem\)/" $f ; done
   pip install Cython
   python setup.py install
   

6. Finally make sure we have numpy and pandas in the plex1 conda environment.

   pip install numpy pandas
   

Loading an existing PLEXOS environment

If you have successfully followed all the instructions in the previous subsection and installed PLEXOS, you can simply load the following modules and activate the conda environment

module purge
module load comp-intel intel-mpi mkl conda
conda activate plex1

Using your own version of R and Python

This section is in regards to Point 3 in setting up the PLEXOS environment. The following R libraries will need to be installed manually in this case.

install.packages("data.table")
install.packages("DBI")
install.packages("dbplyr")
install.packages("doParallel")
install.packages("dplyr")
install.packages("foreach")
install.packages("lubridate")
install.packages("magrittr")
install.packages("parallel")
install.packages("Rcpp")
install.packages("RSQLite")
install.packages("stringi")
install.packages("tidyr")
install.packages("knitr")
install.packages("testthat")
install.packages("ggplot2")
install.packages("covr")
install.packages("tidyverse")

After installing the above, follow the remainder of the installation starting with point 4.