I'm running an Abaqus analysis with a modest number of degrees of freedom (~8000 nodes) on a Windows workstation with 128GB of RAM. I'm using the concrete damage plasticity (CDP) model, which results in 1000's of increments.

The process SMACaeGMain seems to be filling up the available memory at some point during the analysis and it doesn't get cleared after. Strangely enough, this does not always happen, in the beginning of the analysis, but probably after some time when I'm not actively looking at the monitor.

Q: I'm wondering why so much memory is being used and why it isn't cleared when a job is aborted or terminated?

In the job description, 90% of the memory is allowed for allocation (by default), but that doesn't mean it has to be used entirely.

Currently I have to restart Abaqus to clear the memory, which is counterproductive.

Q: Maybe there's a way to avoid this?