topic Re: Will using VB express to multithread speed the program? in Inventor Programming Forum

Will using VB express to multithread speed the program?

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 19:25:01 GMT

I have a repetetive task that will repeat 40k times. I'm thinking about using VB express to write the operation and take advantage of multithreading. However I'm concerned that even if I multithread the code VB will need to write back into IV and it won't speed anything up.

For the time being I'm doing thousands of splits. While I can split up the proccess of splitting does IV become a chokepoint?

Re: Will using VB express to multithread speed the program?

ekinsb — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 22:16:55 GMT

The main process of Inventor is single threaded so it's not possible to perform multiple operations in Inventor at the same time. Multi-threading most modeling operations would be very difficult. For a parametric model, each operation begins with the current state of the model and then modifies the model and adds intelligence to be able to re-compute if changes are made. It's based on one adding one step at a time that builds on what's happened before. What you described is several threads taking the same model, each thread performing operations, and then somehow combine this all together in the end. A very difficult problem and one that's not supported today.

Re: Will using VB express to multithread speed the program?

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 12:55:57 GMT

I figured as much. Darn.

Being someone who's not a hard core programmer this may be a dumb question but can the calculations be divided like a simulink model? I've seen this done w/ some eularian FEA solvers but they were built from scratch and only in linux. I would expect trying to build IV from scratch would be a non starter is there any planned?

Re: Will using VB express to multithread speed the program?

ekinsb — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 00:40:15 GMT

That's essentially what multi-threading is doing. It's breaking a problem into multiple pieces, calculating the pieces independently, and then putting it all together in the end. Some things lend themselves very well and other things don't.

There may be some other modeling approaches you can take that let you do more than your currently doing in a single operation. It's difficult to say without a better understanding of exactly what it is you're trying to do.