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What Computer Hardware Should I Buy for Tecplot 360?


A common question from Tecplot 360 users centers around the hardware that they should buy to achieve the best performance. The answer is invariably, it depends. That said, we’ll try to demystify how Tecplot 360 utilizes your hardware so you can make an informed decision in your hardware purchase.

Let’s have a look at each of the major hardware components on your machine and show some test results that illustrate the benefits of improved hardware.

Test data

Our test data is an OVERFLOW simulation of a wind turbine. The data consists of 5,863 zones, totaling 263,075,016 elements and the file size is 20.9GB. For our test we:

  • Load the data.
  • Compute Q-Criterion.
  • Display an iso-surface of Q-Criterion (the resulting iso-surface consists of 32,248,635 triangular elements).
  • Export an image to PNG format.

The test was performed using 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 CPU-cores, with the data on a local HDD (spinning hard drive) and local SSD (solid state disk). Limiting the number of CPU cores was done using Tecplot 360’s ––max-available-processors command line option.

Data was cleared from the disk cache between runs using RamMap.

Machine Specs

  • Windows 10
  • 32 logical (16 physical) CPU cores. Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz
  • ATA ST2000DM001 Spinning Hard Disk
  • ATA INTEL SSDSC2BA40 Solid State Disk
  • Intel Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
  • 128GB DDR3 RAM
  • Nvidia Quadro K4000 graphics card

Disk

Advice: Buy the fastest disk you can afford.

In order to generate any plot in Tecplot 360, you need to load data from a disk. Some plots require more data to be loaded off disk than others. Some file formats are also more efficient than others – particularly file formats that summarize the contents of the file in a single header portion at the top or bottom of the file – Tecplot’s SZPLT is a good example of a highly efficient file format.

We found that the SSD was 61% faster than the HDD when using all 32 CPU-cores for this post-processing task.

All this said – if your data are on a remote server (network drive, cloud storage, HPC, etc…), you’ll want to ensure you have a fast disk on the remote resource and a fast network connection.

With Tecplot 360 the SZPLT file format coupled with the SZL Server could help here. With FieldView you could run in client-server mode.

Disk Performance at 32-cores

CPU

Advice: Buy the fastest CPU, with the most cores, that you can afford. But realize that performance is not always linear with the number of cores.

Most of Tecplot 360’s data compute algorithms are multi-threaded – meaning they’ll use all available CPU-cores during the computation. These include (but are not limited to): Calculation of new variables, slices, iso-surfaces, streamtraces, and interpolations. The performance of these algorithms improves linearly with the number of CPU-cores available.

You’ll also notice that the overall performance improvement is not linear with the number of CPU-cores. This is because loading data off disk becomes a dominant operation, and the slope is bound to asymptote to the disk read speed.

HDD vs SDD-Performance Scaling

You might notice that the HDD performance actually got worse beyond 8 CPU-cores. We believe this is because the HDD on this machine was just too slow to keep up with 16 and 32 concurrent threads requesting data.

It’s important to note that with data on the SSD the performance improved all the way to 32 CPU-cores. Further reinforcing the earlier advice – buy the fastest disk you can afford.

RAM

Advice: Buy as much RAM as you need, but no more.

You might be thinking: “Thanks for nothing – really, how much RAM do I need?”

Well, that’s something you’re going to have to figure out for yourself. The more data Tecplot 360 needs to load to create your plot, the more RAM you’re going to need. Computed iso-surfaces can also be a large consumer of RAM – such as the iso-surface computed in this test case.

If you have transient data, you may want enough RAM to post-process a couple time steps simultaneously – as Tecplot 360 may start loading a new timestep before unloading data from an earlier timestep.

The amount of RAM required is going to be different depending on your file format, cell types, and the post-processing activities you’re doing. For example:

  • A structured dataset will require less RAM than an unstructured dataset because structured data has implicit cell connectivity, while unstructured data has an explicit cell connectivity, which requires more RAM. For example, we compared a 100 million cell structured vs equivalent unstructured dataset, plotting one slice and one iso-surface. The peak RAM required by Tecplot 360 2022 R2 in this case was as such:
    • Structured dataset: 2.1GB RAM
    • Unstructured dataset: 8.8GB RAM
  • A simple plot of your surface data colored by a scalar is going to require less RAM than computing Q-Criterion and rendering an iso-surface. Why? Because computing Q-Criterion requires loading the volume data, plus several scalars. And then plotting the iso-surface requires the generation of new data in RAM.

When testing the amount of RAM used by Tecplot 360, make sure to set the Load On Demand strategy to Minimize Memory Use (available under Options>Performance).

Load on Demand

This will give you an understanding of the minimum amount of RAM required to accomplish your task. When set to Auto Unload (the default), Tecplot 360 will maintain more data in RAM, which improves performance. The amount of data Tecplot 360 holds in RAM is dictated by the Memory threshold (%) field, seen in the image above. So you – the user – have control over how much RAM Tecplot 360 is allowed to consume.

Graphics Card

Advice: Most modern graphics cards are adequate, even Intel integrated graphics provide reasonable performance. Just make sure you have up to date graphics drivers. If you have an Nvidia graphics card, favor the “Studio” drivers over the “Game Ready” drivers. The “Studio” drivers are typically more stable and offer better performance for the types of plots produced by Tecplot 360.

Many people ask specifically what type of graphics card they should purchase. This is, interestingly, the least important hardware component (at least for most of the plots our users make). Most of the post-processing pipeline is dominated by the disk and CPU, so the time spent rendering the scene is a small percentage of the total.

That said – there are some scenes that will stress your graphics card more than others. Examples are:

  • Showing lots of spherical scatter symbols
  • Many iso-surfaces or a complex iso-surface

Note that Tecplot 360’s interactive graphics performance currently (2023) suffers on Apple Silicon (M1 & M2 chips). The Tecplot development team is actively investigating solutions.

Summary

As with most things in life, striking a balance is important. You can spend a huge amount of money on CPUs and RAM, but if you have a slow disk or slow network connection, you’re going to be limited in how fast your post-processor can load the data into memory.

So, evaluate your post-processing activities to try to understand which pieces of hardware may be your bottleneck.

For example, if you:

  • Load a lot of timesteps and render simple objects like slices or just surfaces, your process is dominated by I/O – consider a fast disk or network connection.
  • Have a process that is compute heavy – like creating complicated iso-surfaces, computing new variables, or doing interpolations – consider more CPU cores.
  • Render a lot of images for a single dataset – for example multiple view angles of the same dataset, your process will spend a lot of time rendering – consider a higher-end GPU.

And again – make sure you have enough RAM for your workflow.

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