The Abaqus sparse linear equation solver executes a large number of "BLAS3" type operations which execute well on machines that can very efficiently performance matrix-matrix multiplications.
As problems grow larger the cost of the linear equation solution will dominate execution time to a greater extent. The cost of an individual iteration in Abaqus/Standard is split between the cost of doing element computations and the cost of solving a system of linear equations. A medium-sized problem may have a very long runtime if the number of iterations required for the problem is very high.
The runtime, but not memory cost, for a problem is also dictated by the number of iterations required to find a solution. As the size of a problem grows, the cost of an individual iteration, both in terms of runtime and memory requirements, grows, making hardware performance critical to solving large problems. A large problem is one with a large number of nodes and elements, or the related measure of number of degrees of freedom. Performance of nonlinear problems in Abaqus/Standard is typically driven by two factors: problem size and number of iterations required to complete a simulation. Compute clusters typically feature a high-speed private network which connects the nodes and a batch scheduler to manage the compute tasks. More common today are distributed memory (DMP) compute clusters, where each compute node can function independently or work together to solve a large problem. In past years compute servers were large shared memory (SMP) machines that were typically shared between many users. Computer servers are machines that are dedicated to computing long-running or large Abaqus jobs as efficiently as possible. In a typical workstation configuration a user is likely to be doing interactive tasks, while the Abaqus job runs in the background.Ĭompute Server: The second hardware category is compute servers. Workstations are typically used for running jobs that do not run for a very long time (over night being the maximum). Typically workstations are single machines with at least 4 cores and 16GB of memory. Workstation: The first hardware category is workstations.
In the following section the basic categories of Abaqus job and hardware used in presenting benchmark data are described. The second variable a user must consider is the type of hardware being considered. A user running eigenvalue analyses with Abaqus/Standard will want to focus on different aspects of a hardware purchase than a user running an electronics drop test with Abaqus/Explicit. Different Abaqus jobs stress hardware in different ways. There are two basic variables a user needs to consider when looking at benchmarks. In order to make good use of the data on this page, users should be careful to understand how the benchmarks are organized and to use data that is representative of their problems. As different Abaqus jobs will stress the hardware in different ways, providing a benchmark suite that is both comprehensive and relatively easy to understand is a challenging task. The Abaqus benchmark suite is designed with the intent of providing users of Abaqus information about how Abaqus will perform on various hardware platforms available on the market. Therefore the timing data presented on these pages should not be directly compared with benchmark data obtained using other Abaqus releases.Īll times are given in seconds and include the time required for the main analysis executables (standard.exe and explicit.exe), the analysis input file processor (pre.exe), and the Abaqus/Explicit packager (package.exe). NOTE: The Abaqus benchmark problems may change between releases. If you are a hardware vendor and would like to submit performance data please contact: simulia.performance-benchmarks(at)3ds.com See Abaqus Performance Benchmarks for instructions on obtaining the input files associated with these benchmark problems. The benchmark problems listed here are available upon request. The benchmarks are organized with the intention of making it possible for users to view the subset of the benchmark data appropriate to their usage of Abaqus. The different Abaqus products and different types of Abaqus analyses are appropriate for different classes of machines and stress machines differently. The Abaqus benchmark problems are intended to provide an estimate of the performance that can be expected when running representative Abaqus analysis jobs on different computer platforms.