Abaqus Explicit SYSTEM TIME too high
 

Dear forum Abaqus experts,

I have a strange problem and the support has no clue what's wrong either. I "just" wanted to borrow a colleague's ryzen 5600X machine for Abaqus/Explicit runs because our dedicated abaqus Xeon machine has become a bit dated (we are currently purchasing a new machine, see this thread in the hardware forum)

Normally these days I squeeze my jobs in on another colleague's ryzen 5950X workstation and I get speedups that are pretty sweet.

Now I thought with just 6 cores on my abaqus license the 5600X shouldn't be much slower, BUT it's severely underperforming. It needs massive amounts of SYSTEM TIME, which according to the manual is defined as follows:
* USER TIME refers to the CPU time spent executing Abaqus.
* SYSTEM TIME refers to the amount of OS kernel CPU time spent by the operating system doing work on behalf of the Abaqus process.

So in my quest to find the cause together with our support, I created a super small (10MB problem size) benchmark job and ran it with all three machines, and while I probably shouldn't even be bothering it's driving me nuts :mad:.

Things I checked so far:

• Hyperthreading is OFF - 6 cores / 6 threads on the 5600X machine
• RAM is available / problem size is super small
• disk is a SATA SSD, but output is only written at four points in the benchmark run

So finally I decided to post this here in case anybody has seen anything like it or has any hints to share.

Ok, I found the solution myself. The WIN10 Ryzen 5 5600X "workstation" had an active "balanced" power plan :o

After switching to "high performance" the machine finally runs as expected - thank goodness!

I hope this will save someone in the future from the madness I went through ;).