ABAQUS Slow on Intel Pentium/Xeon c.f. AMD Ahtlon

[icsmg2]

I have been running ABAQUS 6.4 on different machines, one a Pentium 2.8GHz with 1Gb RAM, the other a Xeon dual processor 2.4GHz with 2Gb Ram, and the third a laptop with AMD Athlon 2800+ with 512Mb Ram. Could anyone please tell me why the AMD machine runs faster than the other two Intel PCs, and whether I can optimise the Intel PCs to run the jobs faster (the Xeon processors seem to run at only 20-30% CPU load)?
Thanks a lot!

 

[MToft]

It may be worth checking what pre- and standard-memory are set to in the abaqus.env file, which tells Abaqus how much RAM to use for each job in the directory containing the ENV file. Setting this to 100% RAM can run the risk of "Code 5" crashes if Abaqus then conflicts with Windows "housekeeping" processes during running, but 70-80% of RAM is a reasonable limit for many processor load profiles.

It might also be possible to increase the swap or page file size to provide more "virtual" memory - the exact location of this setting within the Control Panel depends on the version of Windows.

In addition, machines with slow buses or networks may be slowed down significantly by writing lots of interim results - can you do without these?

Altering anti-virus scan settings to omit the temporary analysis directories may also help - some programs can review every disk read/write by Abaqus which REALLY slows it down!

Hope at least some of these work - good luck!