By default, while meshing, are all the cores on the system used or only one?
If I enable mesh_multicore in Flag manager and use 4 cores, will performance improve?
It would be handy since we often deal with meshes from 3 million even upto 9 million!
Regards
Omkar
You will only see 1 meshing process in task manager. Personally I haven't done any benchmarks with the flag and don't generally use it, but I was told to expect about a max 2x speedup with it turned on.
What sort of speedup are you seeing?
Royce,
Checking this thread http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Simulation-CFD/Multithreading-for-meshing/m-p/3777459/highlig... a user is indicating multi-core meshing could slow down the mesh process in some cases. We're experiencing a very slow "...creating volume mesh" with a simulation utilizing the multi-core option set to 4 and it's only using approximately 25% across all all cores. Is this normal? Would it be better to revert to a lower core setting?
Thanks,
Alright, here are the results:
Clarifications:
1) The time was measured from pressing the Solve buttom until "Meshing complete" appeared in the message pane at the bottom. The process goes on till BC restart, Analysis completed successfully etc. but since the multithreading is used ONLY for meshing, I measured till meshing complete.
2) There were no extruded meshes and hence multithread meshing was not aborted.
3) Both the cases were done on the same part and same physics. To make sure the mesh elements remain close to 5.9 or 1.4 million, I used to coarsen by the factor of 1.05 and again refine by the factor of 0.95 for every measurement.
4) Solver computer was my own PC : 4 cores with 3.4 GHz, 16 GB RAM
5) The coarse and fine mesh was chosen to see if there is any marked benefit of multithreading for larger meshes.
In a nutshell, I do not understand rationale behind multithreading since I see no benefit at least in this benchmarking. I am inclined to believe that if I use cluster with 16 cores for meshing, I infact will end up slowing the process significantly.
Guess the old ways are the best ways.
Cheers
OJ