Here are some general recommendations from the development team:

- Flow Simulation multithreading scalability is optimal on up to 20 cores

- If there are different CPU options with the same number of cores, the higher clock speed is preferable

- Intel processors are preferred simply because most SWFS testing is done on Intel

- All memory banks should be filled – this reduces upgradability, but improves performance

- The memory speed should match that of CPU

The solver is compiled to include the support of AVX, however, the developers are not sure how big the performance benefit from it actually is.

In particular, the developers recommend the processors of the Intel Xeon Gold series provide good performance, if the system is properly configured (according to the recommendations above).

From myself:

Here is a common email response that I send to customers asking about hardware to help them with selecting a system:

Hardware Recommendations and Comments:

I can give you information regarding hardware so that you know what’s important when considering to buy. One thing to note is that it’s not just a single component of your computer system that’s crucial, but you should think of it more holistically in that it’s the whole system working together, including the cooling or thermal management inside the box. Desktops are always going to be faster than laptops.

Clock speed wins over number of cores

Doubling the number of cores will not cut your solution in half. For SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation, be sure to prioritize CPU clock speed over number of CPU cores when selecting a processor. For most users, the best choice is some balance of the two. Remember that with any software, some operations are inherently linear (sequential) and cannot be reliably and effectively multi-threaded. This limits them to a single CPU core. In such cases, you might see better performance on a single CPU quad core (8 threads) system with a 4.5 GHz clock speed than you would on a system with 12 total cores (24 threads) and a 3.0 GHz clock speed. Be careful not to focus on Turbo or Boost speeds from CPU manufacturers as they cannot sustain those speeds for long periods of time without throttling back to keep it from overheating, and consider that most Flow Simulations will take many minutes to several hours to run.

Many portions of the SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation solver are indeed multi-threaded, so you may see significant performance improvement during certain phases of meshing or solving if you have additional cores. Do not expect to see 100% CPU usage all the time, though. Based on my experience, I recommend using Hyperthreading. Note that the larger the problem (more computation cells), the better usage of those cores is going to be utilized.

Intel XEON processor architecture tends to offer better stability and be more consistent for scientific computation, such as requiring error-correcting code (ECC) RAM, so I tend to recommend this over their i7 and i9 lines. It’s preferable to use Intel CPU’s since that’s what the developers use for testing.

Invest in a fast NVMe drive as primary

Ensure you have an NVMe drive with a fast read and write speed as your primary OS drive. Furthermore, when working with any Simulation study, make sure both the model and results folder in study properties is set to a location on an NVMe. Purchasing a fast (generally 3500 MB/s sequential read and write speed or better) and good quality an NVMe is the single most important (and often least expensive) investment you can make for an across-the-board performance improvement for pretty much everything (not only SOLIDWORKS)! For SOLIDWORKS Simulation in particular, there is a huge amount of data throughput when you activate studies, mesh, solve (in the form of temporary files, some of which are written and read to disk during solving), load result plots, and save study data changes. Even a modest 20% improvement in disk read and write speed will be noticeable. NVMe’s are 5x the bandwidth of SSD’s, and real world scenario transfer speeds of over 3GB/s vs 555 MB/s for SSD. This is going to be one of your most perceivable performance enhancement.

RAM

A system with 16-32 GB of RAM is adequate for most users since it is generally preferable to have slightly more RAM available than a typical Simulation user may actually need. Although as little as 8 GB is actually sufficient for many typical studies, certain Flow Simulation functions such as meshing, solving, and viewing results can require larger amounts of RAM if the study has a large number of cells. My recommendation is that RAM is relatively cheap, so don’t skimp on this. Fill up all of the memory slots; this will improve performance but reduce upgradability. So plan on getting enough RAM for current and future models that you might have to solve. I would say to get 32GB as a minimum for Flow Sim, but 64GB or more is recommended.

For scientific calculations, use ECC (error-correcting code) RAM which is usually required for motherboards that support sockets for Intel XEON processors.

Since there is a heavy amount of communication between the RAM and CPU during the calculation, especially for studies that take more time, you will see realizable performance improvements with a motherboard that has a fast BUS and you should get the fastest clock-speed RAM that the mobo supports. Match the RAM speed to the mobo BUS speed.

Graphics Card

SOLIDWORKS certified graphics card is required for some special visualizations in Flow Sim, such as Dynamic Trajectories and Streamlines on cutplots. Make sure you use a certified SOLIDWORKS graphics driver (link) and not necessarily the latest one from the card manufacturer, as it has not been tested and certified by SOLIDWORKS to work with all of the features.

Don’t go hog-wild on a super graphics card with a lot of graphics RAM unless you need it for renderings or other purposes. Why? Graphics RAM has to be addressed in physical RAM so it essentially removes that amount of RAM available to the system.

Posted on 2019-11-07 03:22:04