Product: ABAQUS/Standard
Benefits: The performance of ABAQUS/Standard models with many section and/or material definitions is greatly improved in many situations.
Description: Models with thousands of section and/or material definitions may now run much faster than in previous versions of ABAQUS/Standard and have much smaller output database (.odb) files. The results in Table 2–2 illustrate the performance gains for a model with 10000 linear brick elements (61206 DOF), each with their own unique anisotropic material definition (and, thus, their own section definition). The analysis consists of one general static step with default output and was run on a 2 GHz Windows/x86-32 machine.
Table 2–2 Performance improvements for a particular ABAQUS/Standard model.
| Version | Size of the output database file (ODB) in MB | Wall clock time (s): input file preprocessing | Wall clock time (s): analysis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6.4 | 303 | 1320 | 3201 |
| 6.5 | 45 | 163 | 65 |
Besides improved performance, the only other visible difference between Version 6.5 and Version 6.4 due to the performance enhancements is how averaging regions for element output averaged at nodes are computed. To recover the behavior in Version 6.4, set the ABAQUS environment parameter average_by_section to ON. However, in problems with many section and/or material definitions the default value of OFF will generally give much better performance than the nondefault value of ON.
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