Has anyone found benefit in using a Dual CPU? 1

[t2design]

Thinking of doing an upgrade and just wondering if anyone has found it beneficial, using Solidworks 2004 SP1 on a Dual CPU workstation?

Currently I have a 2.4Ghz, 1 Gb, but the CPU is just bogged down with some of my very large rebuild/redraws for 10 minutes (and yes I invoke light weights).

 

[MadMango]

SW isn't going to make use of dual processors... at least that's the offical response. So I wouldn't buy a dual procesor machine in the hopes of it speeding up any of your modeling work flow.

I have seen both processors have activity when rebuilding large assemblies, and when using COSMOSworks though, but again nothing that would justify dual processors. They do help in multi-tasking though. I can read/write email, work in MS Projects, goof around in Photoshop while I am waiting for other operations to complete in SW.

Ray Reynolds
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
Have you read faq731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[bobsheets]

Has anyone had problems with the "dual processor emulation" mode of the P4's? I had catastrophic shutdowns of my system until I shut this off in the bios. I've never heard it discussed anywhere.

Gateway 3.0ghz P4
XP Pro
3d Labs Wildcat 880
2 Gb ram

 

[NickE]

Yes the dual processor emulation mode is called hyperthreading. It made all of the operations really slow on our machine. Once turned off I notices a 1.8x speed increase In everything (cept photoworks. which can use dual processors.) thou I could mesh in one instance and run an analysis in the other... It's just too difficult to have two instances of SW running, Maybe geostar and solidworks but even then things would be tough..

nick

 

[Theophilus]

I had an dual processor NT machine that was new six years ago (dual 300 Mhz chips--whoa!). At the time, the machine screamed, but with SolidWorks part/assembly processing, an increased use of one chip was a decreased use of the other. So both chips worked, but were never used to more than about 50% of potential. You can watch the dual graphs in the Windows Task Mgr.

For other things, such as background tasks, other programs opened, etc. you may see some benefit, but not nearly as much as a program designed to make use of both processors.




Jeff Mowry
Industrial Designhaus, LLC

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

 

[t2design]

Thanks for the input!!! Single 3.2, is the way to go, for the work I do. Not big on multitasking anyways.

 

[RawheadRex]

I ran dual processors (AMD Athlons ~1.8Ghz...I don't recall specifically) on the workstation I had at my last job. We did notice an increase in performance but it wasn't incredibly significant. We did do quite a lot of FEA at that company though so it helped more on that end.

FWIW I would get the best graphics card I could afford and couple it with the best CPU. That's the most efficient combination for SW IMO.

Just another voice heard from in the crowd.



Chris Gervais
Sr. Mechanical Designer
Lytron Corp.

 

[meintsi]

There is a sideways benefit of dual processors with SolidWorks.

Yes, SolidWorks does not make use of both processors, but the one workstation we have here with duals handles two individual instances of SolidWorks running at the same time quite nicely !!!



Remember...
"If you don't use your head,
your going to have to use your feet."

 

[JNR]

The only known mutli-threading in SW is the user interface and graphics interface. Since the interface overhead is virtually insignificant to today's processors and your modern graphics board is doing most of the graphics grunt work, it does not amont to much and is certainly not worthy of dual processor cost.

BTW: In a large or topographically complex assembly you can see a liitle of the effect in the graphics regeneration during rebuilds as MadMango suggests.

The multi-tasking and FEA issues are real, but for mutli-tasking to be effective you would need to be doing something else while SW was crunching a long process. FEA and similar programs are a natural for multi-threading. PhotoWorks might be too?

On using 2 copies of SW at the same time - I would think that might get a bit dangerous? How is is working out? do you use PDM type products? do use use completely separate project on each or does the OS manage to handle it all OK?

Be naughty - save Santa a trip.

 

[meintsi]

No PDM here.
We only have 5 design users and 1 detailer. The three older designers all copy existing parts/assemblies onto their own network drives as prototype numbers and then pass them to the detailer when complete.

That only leaves the three of us for file/revision management and we always know what each other are working on and follow a well defined system for filing parts/assemblies which works well for us.

Our detailer runs the dual proccessors (older NT box). Typically seperate assemblies but often with common parts. When one of the larger drawings is rebuilding (anywhere from 800 to 1400 parts, complex casting geometry, springs cross-sectioned in a full assemblies, multiple section views or details on a page, etc.) he can work on a faster responding project at the same time.

Our newest machine opens the rebuilds the same file in 20-25% of the time but it can still takes 12-15 min to redraw sometimes. Running two instances has always seemed to be stable and we may replace his workstation with another dual machine because of the flexibility it gives him down the line when NT is totally defunct.






Remember...
"If you don't use your head,
your going to have to use your feet."

 

[HomeMadeSin]

I think it is pathetic that none of the mid-range packages, including SW is multithreaded. Can you think of another application that needs dual procs? Outside of Adobe Premiere (video editing) and Adobe Photoshop, there is no program that is. I just saw a COSMOSFloWorks demo and even it is not multi-threaded. ?

I have a dual proc Dell, but with only single 2.0GHz Xeon chip at this time. This machine does get used for Photoshop, and I hope to take the slight benefits of a 2nd chip one day.

 

[JNR]

The SW database is BY NATURE A SERIAL SOLVER. And it has to be, otherwise you could not roll back the tree and change something. SW "time travel" is one of the things that makes it SO powerful and easy to use (ask any ex Pro-E user!). You CAN'T effectively make use of multi-threading. Furthermore, don't you think that if they could get a simple, cheap, massive performance increase from a multi-threading option they would jump at the chance?!!!! The marketing guys would be beating down the doors on the development department.

BTW: I personally discussed this with Jon H at the first SW World, so I'm not making this $#!* up.

Be naughty - save Santa a trip.

 

[macPT]

Hi all.

Whell, after reading these posts it's still not clear for me!

I have an hyperthreading processor.

Should I use hyperthreading with SW or should I deselect it?

Regards

 

[NickE]

I've turned it off normally but today turned it back on, tried to run one large contact, FEA of an assembly, while starting another instance in a different working directory, eventually the second instance crashed. IMHO Hype-rthreading should be turned off when using SW unless its your desktop and you could do something in the background to use the other half of the processor. Our machine is adeadicated machine and thus really has no other software on it.

nick

 

[dhinners]

You can run two instances of SolidWorks even on a single proc machine. Usually it works OK, tho it does seem to makes things a little flaky at times. It can be valuable for comparing two parts that have the same name - normally you can't open them both at the same time. Of course, then you have to pay close attention to remember which is which.

 

[JNR]

NickE. Doesn't the FEA package you are using make perfectly good use of multi-threading on it's own?

Be naughty - save Santa a trip.

 

[NickE]

Actually no since the FEA pacakage is CosmosM and runs under solidworks, the mesher and the solver both only show 49-50% CPU usage w/ hyperthreading turned on. W/o hyperthreading I see 100% usage on the same tasks.

As a side note the window switching, an other tasks got faster too.

nick

 

[MikeTS]

I use the hyperthreading feature as well. Curious to note that the sparse solver in CosmosWorks uses both halves of the processor, unless I'm seeing something else.....(both sides of the CPU performance graph in windows task manager have shown up to 100%) Never saw that in FFE or FFE+, however - only 50% utilization. (Only one side of the processor shows activity in this case).

I usually run a MS Word or Excel while the FFE is working on something....seems to go OK, no crashes yet. So, at least in my case hyperthreading is a reasonably decent feature. Don't know if I'd necessarily recommend it to anyone, but wouldn't recommend disabling it either.

Anyway, all this is offered FWIW.

Regards

Mike

 

[JNR]

NickE: Don't you mean CosmosWorks? I understood CosmosM is independent of SW. We have both (but I don't use them myself). CosmosM is certainly different from CosmosWorks, since it can do more - which is why we have both. We also have thermal and CFD. I will have to ask our analysis guys which if any of the Cosmos versions can use multi-threading.

Be naughty - save Santa a trip.

 

[NickE]

Well yeah Cosmos works... I've noticed the sparse solver also, maybe since the matrix is processed differently the OS can multithread the calcs. I think that cosmosM, DesignStar and CosmosWorks are mostly the same thing, GeoStar is the really advanced package, can hadle most non-linearities. Yeah we have the CFD and Thermal pacakages also. Really neat stuff just taking a long time to build robust models. I'm such an analysis newbie, I should probably post a question for references.


nick