Description: Memory reductions have been achieved in the analysis preprocessor, packager, and explicit phases, particularly for general contact–related data and element state data. Performance improvements also affect the analysis preprocessor, packager, and explicit phases. The impact is case dependent, but domain-level parallel jobs with substantial edge-to-edge contact or extensive constraints benefit considerably. An example of the improvement in memory requirements is shown for a large model in Table 2–1, comparing the memory used per domain in gigabytes for the ABAQUS/Explicit step across code versions and for both parallel and sequential execution. The parallel performance for the same model is summarized in Table 2–2. Sequential improvement between Version 6.5 and Version 6.6 for this case, which has no edge-to-edge contact, is approximately 30%. The time spent in the preprocessor and packager is very sensitive to available I/O resources.