It’s been a while since I wanted to perform a benchmark of solver speed for my computer. After postponing it for too long, @FEAnalyst showed an excellent tutorial on this Polish site, and now I want to bring it (in English) to our community. The download link is this one.
The benchmark consists of a simple linear elastic analysis of a block under its weight and fixed in one face. The block has 64K elements, with 70K nodes and 414K DOFs.
There are also 5 executable *.cmd files that control each one of the CalculiX solvers (Iterative Cholesky, Iterative Scaling, PastiX, Pardiso, and Spooles). The procedure is to edit each one and run them by double-clicking.
To edit them, one needs to open them in Notepad++, VSCode, or similar software and edit two things:
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The path of the executable CalculiX in your computer (line 5):
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The name of the CalculiX executable (line 25):
When the proper editions are done, you need to double-click the CMD file. A *.logfile will appear and the results of the calculation time will be shown in real-time. It is advised not to run any other applications on your computer meanwhile to not pollute the data.
After running this procedure on each applicable solver you want, you can post-process the results in graphical data (who doesn’t like some Excel plots?):
In my case, anything more than 4 processors doesn’t change much the solver speed. It may vary by analysis and CPU, therefore advanced users can further modify the *.cmd files to run this benchmark in other input files regarding other geometries, non-linear procedures, and steps. Hope this will help someone.
Best regards,
Lucas.
