This should hopefully be a pretty self explanatory post. What would be the best desktop setup to run PLAXIS 3D as fast as possible without being wasteful?
Currently I'm thinking:
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12 Cores (my understanding is PLAXIS 3D can't really make use of more than 8 cores, is this correct?)
Corasir RAM 2 x 16 gb 6000mhz CL30 (is there any benefit to faster RAM?)
For storage I was going to go with a 1tb or 2 tb NVMe SSD. Is there any benefit to going with PCIe Gen 5 over a cheaper Gen 4?
It is understandable that not all CPUs can be tested, but it seems that as the number of elements in the model increases, the software becomes "slower" in terms of reaction and the progress of calculations (those outside the actual iterative process), and in the end it does not matter how good the machine is. In my case, I am running calculations on Dell Precision laptop with 8 core Intel Xeon W-11955M.
At this point I cannot provide many details as the project is still ongoing (and confidential) and I am still working on some updates to the model. The latest version had over 200k elements (a lot of effort put into refinement to speed up calculation time), but with few thousands of volumes (sequential excavation with slow advance rate and some layer intersections) and over a thousand of rock bolts and plates (after intersecting).
The intersecting and generating geometry for staged construction alone takes about 3h, meshing up to 1h if enhanced meshing is used. Number of phases in staged construction is over 200 now. It takes about 15 min per phase (up to 3 days overall), out of which about 10-12 min goes for those kind of calculations:
and only about 3-5 min for actual iterations utilizing the full power of the laptop. Long time of those 'in between' calculation activities seems to be caused by the number of volumes and reinforcing elements. Surprisingly, a lot of time is spend on generating pore-pressures (does not matter if based on phreatic or based on previous stages, or even if everything in the model is set to 'dry'). Even cutting out 20-30s on each phase could speed up the total calculation time by few hours.
Personally, I still like to use Plaxis and I do not see many alternative options (although some colleagues recommend RS and FLAC software to me), but as the models we need to use in practice get larger and more complex, if the software cannot handle them, it does not matter what we personally prefer. We need to use the tools that allow us to get the results.
By the way, as I already complain about unnecessary time needed to get the results, please consider adding to the Tunnel Designer an option to 'insert' steps instead of just add/delate options. For complex sequencing, it can take hours to update the sequence if even a single change in the middle of the sequence requires deleting half of the existing steps and creating them from scratch.