Our engineering department decided to purchase this without IT's
knowledge and now it looks like it's only using 1 out of the 4
cores on the Xeon cpu workstation. I'm wanting to know if there's
anyway to make this a multi-core or multi-threaded application when
it comes to using the FEA portion of CATIA. This would help greatly
as I have a dual quad-core xeon workstation that I'd love to throw
this on. Thanks in advance!
Chris Campos
RE: Can FEA utilize multiple CPU cores?
March 23, 2011 04:53 PM
(in response to Chris Campos)
Supposedly it can. The system will need an environment variable
added.
The variable is: OMP_NUM_THREADS=(Number of processors)
I'm still doing some testing on this but from what it looks like by taking one of our bigger frame models and running it through our CATIA FEA software, the CPU performance graph is showing utilization of 4 cores. I also ran a few intensive tests again but with data collector sets running in the background. CATIA should pick up on this the moment you start it up after adding the variables.
The variable is: OMP_NUM_THREADS=(Number of processors)
I'm still doing some testing on this but from what it looks like by taking one of our bigger frame models and running it through our CATIA FEA software, the CPU performance graph is showing utilization of 4 cores. I also ran a few intensive tests again but with data collector sets running in the background. CATIA should pick up on this the moment you start it up after adding the variables.
Chris Campos
RE: Can FEA utilize multiple CPU cores?
March 23, 2011 04:56 PM
(in response to Chris Campos)
Also don't forget that if your CPU has hyper-threading then the
windows performance graph will only show utilization on the actual
physical cores.
Example: I ran the tests on an i7 Q720
Windows shows 8 cores due to hyper-threading but only has 4 physical cores. There will be 4 cores that show no activity when using this environment variable.
Example: I ran the tests on an i7 Q720
Windows shows 8 cores due to hyper-threading but only has 4 physical cores. There will be 4 cores that show no activity when using this environment variable.
Greg Albrechtsen
RE: Can FEA utilize multiple CPU cores?
March 25, 2011 09:30 PM
(in response to Chris Campos)
Yes, CATIA Analysis can utilize multiple cores. By default CATIA
Analysis will use all that you have. If you want to scale that back
(why I don't know)... then you can limit that through and ENV
variable. The performance increase is greatest going from 1->2
cores, then a good from 2->4, a little more from 4->8, and
slightly more from 8->16. Something you may want to consider is
the new ANL product (avail since R19) which uses the Abaqus
technology within CATIA. Even though it's thought of as a nonlinear
solver you can still use it for linear work (i.e. turn off the
nonlinear stuff). This solver will fully utilize 2 cores in
parallel processing. If you want to fully utilize many many cores
(i.e. 128) then you should consider AFC (Abaqus for CATIA). These
use the same basic interface as CATIA Analysis but a different
solver technology. I hope this helped. Cheers, Greg