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Home / How to Improve the Performance / Recommended PC Specifications for Femtet
Recommended PC Specifications for Femtet
A. The specification depends on budget and analysis scale. The following description is provided to assist you in selecting a PC.
Priority Ranking of PC Components
Whether or not a user has Femtet Accelerator will determine the priority.
The priority is shown below. The component on the left has a higher priority.
If Accelerator is not enabled,
Memory capacity > Number of CPU clocks > Speed of SSD > Memory bandwidth > Cache capacity > Other components
If Accelerator is enabled and the number of CPU cores is 8 or less,
Memory capacity > Number of CPU cores > Number of CPU clocks > Memory bandwidth > Speed of SSD > Cache capacity > Other components
If Accelerator is enabled and the number of CPU cores is more than 8,
Memory capacity > Memory bandwidth > Number of CPU cores > Number of CPU clocks > Speed of SSD > Cache capacity > Other components
Memory:
The PC must have the memory capacity required according to analysis scales and number of meshes.
If the solver that executes the direct method uses a disk due to a shortage of memory capacity, the calculation will take significant time regardless of CPU performance.
The required memory capacity is based on how much memory capacity is used in an analysis. Even if the PC has more memory capacity than the required memory capacity, the calculation time will remain the same.
As described in the CPU section below, a PC can achieve maximum performance when the PC does not have fewer memory modules than the number of memory channels.
SSD:
Femtet saves result files and temporary files on a drive system. The faster SSD a PC has, the faster the PC can save the intermediate data and can read and display the results.
When a disk is used in the analysis with the direct method, a faster SSD will shorten the calculation time.
Typically, the type of SSD referred to as M.2 SSD is known for its fast performance.
Since HDDs are slower in terms of read and write speeds, it is recommended to use an SSD drive for saving temporary or result files.
CPU:
CPUs have specifications including the number of clocks, number of cores, cache capacity, memory bandwidth, corresponding type of memory, and number of memory channels.
You can check the specifications of each part number on the official website of the CPU manufacturer.
Whether or not a user has Femtet Accelerator will determine what is more essential in the specifications.
Without Femtet Accelerator, the number of clocks is the most essential and a larger number of clocks will result in a faster analysis.
With Femtet Accelerator, a larger memory bandwidth will result in a faster analysis.
Memory bandwidth depends on the number of memory channels and the corresponding type of memory that determines the number of memory clocks.
The larger the number of memory clocks and memory channels, the larger the memory bandwidth.
Generally, the latest CPU tends to have a larger memory bandwidth.
If a PC does not have more memory modules than the number of memory channels, it cannot provide the maximum performance of memory bandwidth.
For instance, if a CPU with four memory channels has only two memory modules, the memory bandwidth is halved and the performance suffers.
To provide the Femtet analysis with the maximum acceleration, it is essential that a PC has more memory modules than the number of memory channels.
In double-CPU architectures, if each CPU has eight memory channels, two times as many memory modules as the number of memory channels on each CPU, that is 16 memory modules, will provide the maximum performance.
With Femtet Accelerator, 20 cores per CPU is enough for proper performance.
It is because even if a CPU has more cores than that, the memory bandwidth will be a bottleneck due to the algorithm in Femtet, failing to achieve a sufficient performance.
A CPU has a cache. A larger cache capacity will reduce the number of memory accesses, resulting in faster performance.
It should be noted that memory bandwidth is more essential than cache capacity for faster performance.
Femtet uses the library optimized for Intel-made CPUs.
Examples of Intel-made CPU architectures are shown below.
(1) Intel® Core™ Processors
This CPU supports limited memory capacity. It is suitable for the analysis of small models.
As it has a larger number of clocks than (2) and (3), it is possible to perform a faster analysis without Femtet Accelerator.
(2) Intel® Xeon® W Processors
The specifications of the number of cores, memory bandwidth, and installable memory capacity are higher than (1).
Only single-CPU configuration is available. This may be more cost effective than the single-CPU configuration of (3).
The number of cores, number of clocks, and memory bandwidth vary depending on the part number, so it is recommended that you check the specifications on the official website.
(3) Intel® Xeon® Silver, Gold, Platinum Processors
Since dual-CPU configuration is available, they can provide better performance than single-CPU configuration.
The number of cores, number of clocks, and memory bandwidth vary depending on the part number, so it is recommended that you check the specifications on the official website.
Graphic Board
The recommended graphic boards are NVIDIA® T400 and NVIDIA® RTX A2000 professional graphics boards.
The boards accelerate displaying the results of analyses in Femtet like in general CAD software.
The boards are not involved in calculations by solvers. High-performance graphics boards will not shorten the calculation time.