bridges Structural Analysis SUPER COMPUTER??

tuckman321 · December 11, 2019

Howdy ya'll,

What type of hardware runs structural analysis software the fastest?

I'm a noob so please explain like I'm 5. I'm specifically curious about running Midas Civil. https://en.midasuser.com/product/civil_overview.asp

Some of my complex bridge rating models take as long as 15 hours to run and produce over 100 GB of data. The record in my office is over 400 GBs for one bridge!! The computers at work are powerful-ish with i7 processors and 32 GB of memory and SSDs. If I had say $3,000 to spend could I build a machine that could cut the processing time in half? What would it look like? Would it be similar to a mining machine or 4k video editing machine? Do I need a CPU with as many cores as possible for this type of computing?

This is all that Midas provided as far as system requirements.

CPU	Pentium IV or better performing PC processor (Pentium IV 3GHz or greater recommended)
Memory (RAM)	1GB (2GB or greater recommended)
HDD Space	5 GB (30GB or greater recommended)
Video Memory	128 MB or greater
Video Card	GeForce NVIDIA type video card recommended (On-board video card is not recommended.)

System Recommendations
In general, better system will make the analysis and software performance smoother and faster.

(higher memory Ram, local drive storage, etc.) There are system recommendations :

System Recommendations
Operating System	- 64 bit operating system - If the system can handle GPU, that is even better.
HDD Type	SSD (Solid State Drive)
Graphic Card	NVIDIA G-Force Line Graphic card

LogicWeasel · December 11, 2019

It looks like they take advantage of CUDA or they wouldn't have called for the NVIDIA graphics card with high V-RAM. The question is, where the diminishing returns show up if you go for like, a GTX 1070 or if an RTX 2080 or Quadro 5000 is a bit overkill. You'd need a forum or expert who has tested the software, or a company rep willing to shed light on what their testing shows.

Aside from that more CPU may help, but hard to tell if it'll use a 12-Core or not. Looks more clear that having NVMe storage would be likely to be very helpful, so perhaps carve some budget for at least a 1TB NVMe for best storage results.