Inventor FEA hardware optimization, questions -- comments ---links in the dark

[Anonymous]

Hey guys, 

I am a computer technician for a company with an engineer whose system is running slowly with FEA. I am not an autodesk user, myself so please pardon my ignorance.

We are running Product Design Suite Ultimate 2014 on an HP z220 system with a firepro v3900, 4core/ 8thread Xeon, 24GB ram....

When the engineer is doing FEA it is dirt slow at completeing the process. It isn't using much ram, but is completely using up most of the cores/threads.

I understand that inventor just started utilizing more than one cpu core in the last couple years.
How can  we speed up this system?
Can we add another video card and dedicate that card to physics calculations?
can we use the current video card and throw more of the physics calculations at it?

What steps would you guys take to optimize the system that I have? (maybe just throw me a link to a good recent article if you know one)
Within a moderate budget what would you buy to make this system perform well?

For humor, and to show how thankful I am I have attached a humorous picture to this post that is completely off topic.

[LT.Rusty]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hey guys, 

I am a computer technician for a company with an engineer whose system is running slowly with FEA. I am not an autodesk user, myself so please pardon my ignorance.

We are running Product Design Suite Ultimate 2014 on an HP z220 system with a firepro v3900, 4core/ 8thread Xeon, 24GB ram....

When the engineer is doing FEA it is dirt slow at completeing the process. It isn't using much ram, but is completely using up most of the cores/threads.

I understand that inventor just started utilizing more than one cpu core in the last couple years.
How can  we speed up this system?
Can we add another video card and dedicate that card to physics calculations?
can we use the current video card and throw more of the physics calculations at it?

What steps would you guys take to optimize the system that I have? (maybe just throw me a link to a good recent article if you know one)
Within a moderate budget what would you buy to make this system perform well?

For humor, and to show how thankful I am I have attached a humorous picture to this post that is completely off topic.

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It sounds like Inventor is behaving correctly, tbh.

The FEA module is one of the few places that Inventor is multithreaded, so if you're seeing full CPU usage during simulations, then it's working correctly.  The easiest way to speed things up during FEA is to optimize your model before you run the simulations.  By this I mean ... exclude features from the simulation that aren't going to matter.  Things like small holes, added text markings, that sort of things.  Exclude parts that aren't going to matter - if you can get by with using a pin constraint in the simulation rather than using a bolt, then do it.  If you've got parts that aren't actually under any load or whose performance you don't need to worry about - exclude them.  If you're trying to determine whether or not a crane boom will survive a certain load, you can safely get rid of the sheet metal plating on the cab, and the seats, and the control panel and ... etc.  This will all make your simulation run faster.  Your mesh settings might be too tight, causing the computer to have to think to hard.  You might have a few thousand weld beads in there - this will stress out your machine.

To see what's going on with your individual set of files for FEA, we'd probably need to actually look at the files themselves, or at least look at screenshots of them.

As far as your other questions -

1.  No, you can't use the video card to accelerate your physics calculations.

2.  Easiest way to improve performance without messing with the model / simulation setup is to get a faster CPU.  This is one of the few areas where more cores is better than more gHz with Inventor.  (Of course, more cores AND more gHz is WAY better.)