In general, the Aqwa solver has minimal memory requirements. For radiation/diffraction analysis, however, a highly optimized solver is employed, and this requires that the complete source strength matrix be stored in memory. The program allocates memory based on the number of diffraction panels in the simulation. The approximate amount of memory (in MBytes) required for a radiation/diffraction analysis is determined by:

where N is the maximum number of diffraction panels in the simulation.

If Aqwa fails to allocate the required amount of memory in a radiation/diffraction analysis, a multi-block linear equation solver is used, which requires at least 400 MB of available memory. This solver is significantly slower than the standard solver.

On Linux, an environment variable (AQWA_STACKLIMIT) is provided to allow you to set the maximum size of the stack space needed to run Aqwa. The default value is 1048576 kbytes (1Gbyte). Stack limits are reset to their original value after the run.