Plaxis 3D multi core support

Good Afternoon,

Plaxis indicates that when using the Picos solver will support up to 256 cores, in reality how scalable is the solver, is there a number of cores where the improvement in run times does not improve as core count increases. would I be better with say an 8 core 9700k  (3.6 GHz) CPU or an 18 core  XW2295 ( 3GHz) CPU. Have Bentley done any Benchmarking on this?

Thanks in advance

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  • Dear Paul,

    We have performed some benchmarks in the past, however, it is difficult for us to follow the ongoing production of CPUs out in the market.

    From the benchmark, we could clearly see that if you need to make a choice between more CPU cores or faster CPU cores, you should go for the faster cores for the PLAXIS calculation speed. We have seen once you have at least quad-core processors, you benefit more from a faster CPU than from more cores.

    From our benchmarking, we do not see a conclusive speed increase for all kinds of calculation types (Plastic, Consolidation, Dynamics, etc.) in the calculation when you have more than 8 cores. 

    Note that we do not use hyperthreading, but the PLAXIS calculation will utilize all physically available cores.

    Answer Verified By: Paul McKenna 

Reply
  • Dear Paul,

    We have performed some benchmarks in the past, however, it is difficult for us to follow the ongoing production of CPUs out in the market.

    From the benchmark, we could clearly see that if you need to make a choice between more CPU cores or faster CPU cores, you should go for the faster cores for the PLAXIS calculation speed. We have seen once you have at least quad-core processors, you benefit more from a faster CPU than from more cores.

    From our benchmarking, we do not see a conclusive speed increase for all kinds of calculation types (Plastic, Consolidation, Dynamics, etc.) in the calculation when you have more than 8 cores. 

    Note that we do not use hyperthreading, but the PLAXIS calculation will utilize all physically available cores.

    Answer Verified By: Paul McKenna 

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