I love the work that has been done on PrePoMax, its made getting up and running super easy.
I was wondering if it would be possible to bundle a pre-compiled version of the gpu enabled Pastix with PrePoMax as well as Spooles. Compiling Pastix appears to be overly complicated and there seem to be alot of issues with getting it compiled properly with GPU support. Would be fantastic if that could also be included to prevent that headache for other new users.
I also think that it would be nice to include this solver in the PrePoMax package. Just keep in mind that there are some issues with modal analyses solved with PaStiX in CalculiX versions older than the newest one (2.19) where this issue was reportedly fixed.
For now, you can find the compiled solver files (including PaStiX) on Ihor’s website: PrePoMax
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I keep the “old” version of the Calculix since it is the one that is the most tested. Inexperienced users might not be aware that some solver versions do not work for all scenarios. And then my email gets flooded by bug reports which are not my doing. But since Pastix integration is getting better I will consider it for the next PrePoMax release. But as far as I know, GPU support is only for the Linux Calculix version or am I wrong?
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Hi guys for very big models i experienced the error " job solution doesnt exist" this is because spooles does need a lot of RAM for big models. When i used the pardiso solver i was able to generate Results. It took my quite a while to figure out how to setup pardiso with Prepomax until i found ihor`s website where Pardiso is compiled. So i think to enlarge the possible use cases for Prepomax those two solver options (Pardiso and Pastix) are really helpful. Maybe we can explain the restrictions of the solvers in the manual?
I would like to add Pardiso files to the release version but I think the Pardiso license prevents it. Or am I wrong? What are your experiences using the CalculiX 2.19 and the Pastix solver?
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Hi Matej,
I would like to make this topic to all of us present again, since i just saw a user complain about big calculation times with spooles (See General Topics). I did some research regadring the MKL Licencing and i found this link :
There they wrote, that pardiso can be used at no cost, so I would assume that it is fine if you release it along with a new Version of Prepomax.
What do you guys think ?
Cheers
From what I know, indeed Pardiso became freely available along with Intel oneAPI MKL (this also includes compilers e.g. for Abaqus Fortran subroutines). However, as long as we are not sure about all the nuances of what is allowed by Intel’s license for Pardiso, I would avoid adding it to the release version of PrePoMax. That post from Intel’s forum is a good hint but not a 100% reliable source, especially that it dates back to 2017.
PaStiX is open-source but can still cause some issues, even though the biggest ones (with eigenfrequency extraction analyses) should be fixed in ccx 2.19. Unfortunately, PaStiX requires the equation system to fit in available RAM and thus may fail with large models. That’s not the case with Pardiso.
All in all, I think that it would be best to have these two solvers (Spooles and PaStiX with ccx 2.19) available in the package with Spooles still being the default one. Ihor’s website referenced above has nice ready-made executables with multiple solvers. You can always download Pardiso from that or another website if you want.
Is there any update on this topic? Just tried to find in the documentation if GPUs could be used by PrePoMax by afraid not any wiser yet 
Many thanks!
It should work with PaStiX and a proper command: PaStiX4CalculiX does not use GPU - #5 by max - CalculiX (official versions are on www.calculix.de, the official GitHub repository is at https://github.com/Dhondtguido/CalculiX).
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