Hi all, I'w working with meshing using VisCART of ESI-Group. I have this problem: 32GB of RAM is not enough for my complex geometry. I set the file paging dimension to 80GB on the SSD drive. So now the system has almost 110GB of memory available. Anyway VisCART crashes without reaching all the available memory: I'm watching the 'Commit' tab of the Memory on the monitoring resource display of Win10, and never it reach 80GB; it crashes when it reaches about 55GB. Does it depends on VisCART? Or Windows? Anyway is it useful to do this for very complex meshes? Is it possible that a software is not able to manage all that memory?
Is there a free tool to optimize the performance of the memory utilization? Is there a method to understand the problem? For example a tool that gets all memory status when a process crashes?
Is it true that this operation is dangerous for the SSD drives? Is better to use an old hard disk?
Thanks
I think it may be a problem of windows. previously I tried some software in my PC having 16 GB memory. It crashed several times and then I reinstalled windows and now it is working fine.
The short answer:
Get access to more ram, either upgrade the local system or use a cloud service. Determine if ESI offers the software for Linux and switch to a supported distribution.
The long answer:
On the software side, the ESI-Group sometimes offers Linux versions of their software. If possible I would recommend you switch to one of their supported linux distributions such as RHEL or possibly Centos in order to eliminate any Windows idiosyncrasies, although a fresh Windows install may be a quick fix as suggested in the previous response. As for hardware, as soon as you move to using a pagefile performance will seriously suffer, and instabilities are more likely, unless the routines used in VisCart are optimized for out of core processing and you have a very high performance/reliable ssd drive. If you don't have local access to a system with 96GB to 128GB of ram you could try a cloud service like Amazon EC2 which would give you access to the resources you need at reasonable hourly rates. AWS M4 instances can run Windows or Linux and provide up to 256GB of ram and 64 threads. Finally, you "could" quickly and easily combine 4 to 6 SSD drives in RAID 0 and use this as a scratch disk for your page file. This may be enough of a performance boost to allow the application to continue to perform properly for pagefile sizes greater than 55GB. That being said, the cost of adding another 64GB of ram to an existing system is much less than purchasing 4 to 6 ssd drives, and will have superior performance. So unless you have a bunch of nearly free ssd drives laying around, find a way to get more ram.
To J. L. Pelletier, why do you suggesto to move to a Linux distro? Is good Ubuntu? In that case is better than Windows the managing of the swap memory? In Ubuntu I'll have the possibility to change the swap memory dimension according to each simulation? Or I have to fix it at its installation?
Saverio:
By using a Linux distro you get access to both a high performance operating system,
a vast amount of free and open source software for science/engineering, and a community of dedicated software developers eager to help you. You may also find a free software that can do what you are trying to achieve with VisCart. For example, Paraview and Visit are great open source packages used for scientific visualization. As you develop your skills, having a good working knowledge of Linux will also allow you to easily transition to clusters used for high performance computing (HPC).
Ubuntu is just one of many Linux distributions. A distribution (distro) is a tailored set of software packages, a package manager application, and a support community of developers/users. Ubuntu is commonly used to help Windows users ease the transition to Linux, but it will most likely not be the final distribution you will end up using the most. For example, the distributions I have used and favor are debian, RHEL/Centos, and Gentoo. Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian. There are many other distros, each tailored to a particular purpose. Regardless, switching to any Linux distro will likely make you much more productive.
As I mentioned in my first post, if you really need to use the VisCart software, I would contact the organization and ask what distribution their software is guaranteed to work on.
While you can make a fixed dedicated swap partition during installation, a swap file is more versatile and very easy to manipulate from any distro's command line. Simply create a file of the size you want using "dd", then format it to be a swap file with "mkswap", then activate it with the "swapon" command. Regardless, the swap file approach is not going to give you the performance you need, only increasing the available RAM will do that. However, using a Linux distro may avoid having a system crash after 55GB of swap is allocated. Although, it could be crashing for other reasons, such as a hardware problem, or a bug in VisCart.
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