Does SW2008 take advantages of multicore processor? Any recommandation or suggestion. I'm not satisfied with the SW 2007 performance, because use only 2 of 4 processor in quad configuration. In that sense is the reason to build supercomputer like microwulf? Thx in advance Davor
CAD is very difficult to parallelize. Think about the parent/children relations in your feature tree, and you'll see that 2 or 4 cores are of little help to rebuild feature quicker. Some specific features which are fairly long to rebuild might be partly parallelized. I'm thinking of shells, which could be possibly divided into 2-4 parts each calculated on a different core, then merge the results (which takes some extra time compared to a mono-thread calculation). I'm fairly sure Parasolid works on such things, because it's their business rather than SolidWorks. The day Parasolid (or ACIS) will be multithread, all the CADs will take advantage of it. AFAIK, at this point SolidWorks uses 2 cores only in drawings, where the high-quality for printing is computedin the backgroud while you work on a low-quality drawing on screen. Photoworks and Cosmos are multithreaded, since parallelism is fairly straightforward for those applications.
Philippe,
Actually the parasolid kernel is multi-threaded. For a long time this was visible when doing detailed performance assessments of single versus dual processors.
When horizontal modeling is used the history dependence is to a large part removed. The handling of the fancy user interface graphics certainly does not have to share the same processor that. One of the things that is becoming more apparent with SWX is that seemingly slight changes in modeling technique can cause HUGE changes in solution/rebuild times. This was proven with the challenge I put out some time ago to build a truncated icosahedron. The final geometry was the same in each case and the method that solved the fastest was the most complex. But strangely the model that was second fastest wasn't all that different than some of the slowest models in that it had very few features. The upshot is that there was no apparent way to see the effects of decisions in how the modeling was done. For the competitive group that participated some I know tried to reduce rebuild times.
But I really don't think that:
a. it is that difficult to parallelize many time consuming processes especially in drawings where the model is already solved and the big crunch is projecting lines.
b. it is that difficult to parallelize some of the new features we have begun seeing. For example suppose parallel processing was used to simultaneously solve for the fastest way. Or to solve several components in an assembly. Or several views in a drawing?
TOP
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