P&K MPI₃ (AUSTAL Multi Core)

Tips regarding perfomance and operation

Other Software

Note that programs like ScreenSavers, AntiVirus software and others can have a negative performance impact on a calculation.

AUSTAL Settings

Other factors are of course the program settings, but especially settings which cause cooling towers etc. to get involved.

RAM

Give your system enough RAM. I've seen AUSTAL using 1000MByte of RAM. Now multiply that by the number of cores and you can estimate the amount of RAM you need in addition to what your system is using. If there is not enough RAM available, your system will start to swap and that will decrease performance significantly. Watch the disk access light. If that is on often, check if your system is swapping and if so put in more RAM. Note that 32Bit Windows systems can address only 4GB. We are looking for a way to bypass this problem, but until then one can only reduce the number of used cores. One can check the memory consumption of AUSTAL in the Task Manager under Processes.

Services

Disable unneeded services. You probably don't need to have the indexing service on. You could turn off that your system updates file information on every read of a file. You may turn of file access time updates for NTFS file systems. You should turn off the task scheduler if you don't use it.

Disk usage

Disk usage shouldn't go over 80% as that makes disk access significantly slower. Also watch fragmentation of the file system and the especially the Master File Table (MFT) on NTFS.

Network

Don't play with the network while a calculation job is running. This might cause a crash. Our programs communicate via network sockets. Turning wireless on or off under Windows will interupt internal network connections.

Heat

The calculation heats up the CPU significantly. If the CPU cooling is not sufficient, the CPU speed will be stepped down even to an emergency shutdown. So make sure your computer has good cooling.

Intel CPU

The program (like the original programs) was compiled with an Intel Compiler and may be better optimized for Intel CPUs. Test with the GCC compiler produced always slower programs, despite similar optimization settings.