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Efried1-Visitor
1-Visitor
November 25, 2011
Question

Performance

  • November 25, 2011
  • 2 replies
  • 6252 views

Hello,

I'm seeking your advice for boosting performance of my Mathcad programms. My questions are

  1. does it make sense to use dual or quad core processors with Windows 7 and mathcad 14?
  2. are there optimizing possibilities resulting from benchmarking exercises with regards to the use of indices, calling other functions or programms, vectors, conditional branches etc.
  3. What kind of blocks might be optimized by Mathcad automatically, some refuse.

I would guess that it makes sense to assign values to simple variable when handing them over to other programms.

many thanks in advance

Gerfried

2 replies

E
Efried1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
December 11, 2011

Additionally the question arises what modern "eight" core architectures might contribute. I have learned recently that AMD only uses four FPUs. May be the FPUs will be replaced entirely by GPUs. So far Intels i7 might be the better choice to boost the Mathcad calculation performance?

BTW: The absence of answers underly my fear that Mathcad is mostly used for small calculation sheets and larger projects are done using compilers or Matlab/SciLab!

R
RichardJ19-Tanzanite
19-Tanzanite
December 11, 2011

Multiple processors will not help.

The question wasn't answered (at least, on my part) because it's too general. Of course there are things that will make Mathcad code run faster, but there is no single place where that information exists. I don't feel much of an inclination to write a long essay (or short book?) on the subject. Vectorization was discussed here: http://communities.ptc.com/message/154931#154931 We have also discussed memory allocation in Mathcad at some length, although I can't find the thread(s). And, of course, avoid deeply nested loops, numeric derivatives, numeric integrals, solve blocks, etc. Don't evaluate numeric integrals multiple times for different limits (use odesolve instead). What's going to help the most depends a lot on the problem though.

M
mzeftel1-Visitor
1-Visitor
December 12, 2011

Mathcad Prime 2.0, when it releases, has support for multiprocessing (the default is off, so you need to turn it on) and will have two versions, 32-bit and 64-bit.

Mona

E
Efried1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
December 20, 2011

Hello Mona,

you certainly have heard of GPGPU, which helps to boost the FLOPS much easier than relying on CPU-internal FPUs by using GPUs. So may be it is useful to think about introducing an single precision option and ability to use GPUs?

E
Efried1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
December 21, 2011

ok, after some research I give up waiting for wonders - may be some i5 670 or i7 2600 CPU would be sufficient for the moment. Do you have some experience regarding calculation power- there are so many CPU versions on the market. What CPUs is best supported by Mathcad and affordable (<200 USD)?

thanks a lot

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