General Options
Define the general parameters temperature, random seed and parallelization.
Temperature
When Grammage (or Density or Weight Percentage) is chosen as Stopping Criterion, a temperature can be entered. The temperature is considered for materials with temperature dependent density.
Choose the temperature in Kelvin, Celsius, or Fahrenheit.
Random Seed
Random Seed initializes the random number generator behind the structure generator. Changing its value produces different sequences of random numbers and hence, different realizations of the specified structure. If all settings are equal, generating with the same Random Seed value produces exactly the same structure, as shown by the Structure ID number in the Status section. The Random Seed is a non-negative integer number, it increases automatically with every generation run.
Varying the Random Seed allows generating different samples of the same structure for a series of experiments. In the following examples, all parameters are unchanged while the random seed is modified with every generation run.
Parallelization
Control how many threads are used for the structure generation. Click the Edit button to access the available parallelization options.
Structure generation algorithms can be parallelized if your license and hardware allow it. The Parallelization Options dialog opens when clicking the Edit button, to choose between Sequential, Parallel (Shared Memory) or Automatic Number of Threads.
When Sequential is selected, no parallelization is applied.
When Parallel (Shared Memory) is selected, the Number of Threads can be entered. Below, the maximum number of available threads and the maximum number of licensed parallel processes is shown in the dialog.
If Automatic Number of Threads is selected, the number of parallel processes is automatically selected for optimal speed, based on the number of CPU cores and licensed parallel processes.
For up to eight Available Threads, all of them will be used. If more than eight threads are available, two cases might occur.
- The number of Available Threads is larger (or equal) than the Number of CPU Cores:
- Then the maximum of eight and Number of CPU Cores divided by 2 is used.
- The number of Available Threads is smaller than the Number of CPU Cores:
- Then the maximum of eight and number of Available Threads divided by 2 is used.
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Note! Using Automatic Number of Threads prevents Hyper-Threading to ensure optimal loading of the processor. |
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Parallelization Benchmark Results As an example for the parallelization, the complete overlap in a granular structure is removed with different number of processes. The computation is run on a server with 2 x Intel E5-2697A v4 processors with 16 cores each, running with a maximum of 3.60 GHz, and 1 TB RAM. The large grain structure has size 10003 voxels and 10 % solid volume percentage. Remove Overlap is used with stopping criterion 0% remaining overlap. The memory usage was 2.1 GB. As can be observed, the parallelization reduces the runtime significantly. With four processes, the runtime is already reduced by over 60%. |
