Selecting Optimal Configurations for Distributed Analysis
This section provides some basic guidelines for configuring a distributed analysis In this section, assume that a fixed number of machines and cores are available, and that the goal is to use them as efficiently as possible.
In the majority of situations, configuring a Distributed Solution Option (DSO) in combination with the multiprocessing option to take optimal advantage of the available hardware results in improved speed.
This assumes that there is enough hard drive space and memory for DSO simulations. For multiple DSO simulations on a single machine, the total memory needed is the sum of the memory used by each simulation. For example, consider a discrete frequency sweep in which each frequency point needs 3.5GB. A quad core system with 8GB of RAM would rely heavily on swap, which is highly inefficient. In this case, updating the number of tasks in the machine list is ideal.