dual core processor

[innov]

Hi,
Is it just me, or are there other people that are annoyed, annoyed, annoyed to the end of their wits that SW and Cosmos don't utilize dual core processors? Seems to me if those 2 can't use it what else should be entitled to it; and here we have it sitting idle most of the time. If I could at least have some kind of explanation for it...


sorrrrry if I appear to be nitpicking; it's simply something that one thinks about every time I have to wait during rebuilds, esp. when it gets too repetitive.

cheers!

 

[dezignstuff]

Cosmos reportedly does make use of dual processors, and I know SW does to some extent, especially for drawings, assemblies, and some selected feature types.

Why do you think Cosmos doesn't use dual processors?

 

[SolidAir]

Actually I am glad SW does not use dual processors. I can have other programs running while I am working on SW. Now it they could make it so you could select when it does and when it does not, then I am all for it.

SA

 

[innov]

I watched the processor bars in task manager...they both never graphed to the top at the same time; and processor usage never rose above 55 percent.

 

[StefanHamminga]

I had something like that, in my case the cores were starving for bandwith (AMD opteron 2.65GHz), If your benchmarks are what they are supposed to be (try sisoft sandra) try (first) to set your pci latency to 32 clocks instead of the default 64 (most mainboards, exept tyan, tyan defaults at least some mainboards to 32 clocks)

Stefan Hamminga
EngIT Solutions
CSWP/Mechanical designer/AI student

 

[J-C]

What version of Solidworks are you on?

Jason

UG NX2.02.2 on Win2000 SP3
SolidWorks 2005 SP5.0 on WinXP SP2
SolidWorks 2006 SP3.3 on WinXP SP2

 

[dezignstuff]

If you use standard features like extrudes and fillets, it probably is pretty single thread oriented. When I saw things spike for multi-thread was with move face, knit surface, combine functions, things I see in modeling all the time, but maybe other folks don't.

Still, Cosmos should be very multi threaded.

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

I read somewhere just recently that a process can be "dedicated" (or at least associated) to run using a specific core, I believe, via the Task Manager.

Anyone have more info on that?


Helpful SW websites FAQ559-520
How to get answers to your SW questions FAQ559-1091

 

[StefanHamminga]

CBL, you could do that in the task manager, it is called affinity. Rightclick a process -> set affinity.

To be honest though, I am no fan of manually tuning affinity, if SW does any multithreading (and it does, just not a lot) and you set affinity to a single core you have just shot yourself in the foot (unless your MS Word does use a full core)...


Stefan Hamminga
EngIT Solutions
CSWP/Mechanical designer/AI student

 

[innov]

SW '06 SP0.0 on win XP SP 2; CPU 4200Athlon, 2gb ram, Raid 0, ATI firegl 3100 pci express

 

[engAlright]

To my knowledge Cosmos uses dual-cpu for meshing as well as direct sparse and FFEPlus solvers (not FFE).

SW uses dual-cores or dual-cpu's for:

-boolean operations (cut, extrude)
-Healing, data translation
-Creating PDF’s
-HLR – high quality views – updating of views in the background while you can still work on the drawing. i.e. on a Multi-processor machine, high-quality view creation does not stop when you move the mouse (little hourglass that appears over a draing view icon when you first load a drawing)

 

[Rocko]

I also was curious about this. The best of both worlds will be the use of 64 bit operating system and dual core. I just wonder if the so called standard will change before SW gets up to speed.

 

[beachcomber]

A quick search on the web found this :

"Parasolid is a multithreaded kernel, which generally results in a 30 to 50 percent speed increase when employed in a dual-processor system"

So the core of SolidWorks (and SolidEdge and UG/NX) is multithreaded, which is probably why some of the commands in SW can use multithreading.

bc

 

[RawheadRex]

I was lead to believe that a fair amount of part modelling is linear (i.e. a sketch is the basis of Base extrude, and a hole is punched through a Base extrude, a pattern depends on its seed and so forth) and therefore multi-threading is of little use. However there is definitely a performance increase with multi-processor boxes. Granted I had that conversation a number of years ago with a rep from our VAR and from what I'm reading things have changed to a point where it's a more pronounced bump in speed.

Getting back to linearity in processes, I'm in the midst of a course on object-oriented programming and Java (NOT javascript) and have recently learned that when you program an application to be multi-threading there is a misconception that threads actually run in parallel. The fact of the matter is that in Windows that is not really the case. Threading is accomplished by a mechanism called "time-slicing" which allocates a certain amount of time in a program to perform an action. So when you're in sketch mode for instance and draw a line then if the processor is in the midst of performing another action either one of these tasks must stop and wait for the other. We never really see that up front but that's basically what happens (and a programmer is responsible for precedence).

The point with being linear is that in a rebuild it's not practical to instantiate multiple threads because it just ends up work much the same as if it wasn't multi-threaded. The objects in memory are chained together in hierarchical fashion and have to complete their work in a top down fashion.

This is a very high-level basic picture of why SolidWorks doesn't take full-time advantage of dual processors and certainly there's a lot more meat to it than this. However I thought it might be a tiny bit informative (if not largely boring - I mean we all just want more speed from SolidWorks!).

Regards,
Chris Gervais