Seeking advice for PC for pre- and postprocessing in Abaqus CAE
 

Hi everyone,

I'm in the process of configuring a workstation primarily for Abaqus CAE, focusing on preprocessing and postprocessing tasks. I frequently run into performance issues, particularly with lengthy animations during postprocessing, such as color plots of stresses on deformed geometries. My preprocessing work involves numerous revisions via a Python script and this can take anywhere from 10 to 120 minutes every time I run the preprocessing script.

I am doing my Abaqus Explicit and Standard analysis on a server with remote access and will copy the ODB files to my workstation for postprocessing.

Both the preprocessing and postprocessing seems to be mostly a single threaded process that does not load the GPU significantly (only tried it on pc with a Nvidia RTX 3060). For that reason I was thinking that it would be most important to have a high single core performance "consumer" cpu like Intel Core i9-14900K. However, I'm also curious about the potential impacts of faster SSD and RAM communications and whether a professional GPU, like those from the Quadro series, could better utilized a GPU and speed it up.

Any experience or advice you could share on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

You are correct that a python script is single threaded. You could look into using multiple python scripts that each do a part of the task. If you split the job in eight equal python script tasks, you would speed up the work by a factor eight on an eight core cpu (except as limited by io and memory bandwidth).

Speeding up this work with faster single core performance is only a marginal improvement. At best a factor two, I would estimate.

The excessive pre and post processing times you are experiencing suggest that you have a software issue rather than a hardware issue. Maybe you could pose a question here: www.cfd-online.com/Forums/structural-mechanics/