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White Paper:
Abstract
This paper aims to remove the marketing hype
surrounding parallel processing and its performance
impact on CAM systems. Delcams research to date
helps to separate the fact from the fiction and gives
you a true understanding
of parallel processing in
the CAM environment.
In particular,
questions:
this
paper
addresses
the
following
Contents
1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1
1. Introduction
The new buzz words in computing at the moment
seem to be multi-core and parallel processing.
Increasing the clock speed of the processor has been
replaced by increasing the number of processor cores
in your computer. But what advantage does increasing
the number of cores in a processor give you and does
the reality actually live up to the hype?
PowerMILL 10 benefits
(See Section 3.
2.
Preparation
Edit
Calculation
Foreground
Background
Constant Z
3D Offset
Area clearance
Interleaved constant Z
Optimised constant Z
Boundary calculations
3. Performance improvements in
PowerMILL 10
Delcam has tested PowerMILL 10 on a range of
typical 3-axis parts. These tests show major speed
improvements for raster machining when using multiprocessor machines. Figure 7 on page 4 shows the
raster toolpath calculation time for PowerMILL 10 as a
percentage of the time taken by PowerMILL 9 on the
same computer, for a number of different processor
configurations.
Figure 6: Raster toolpath multi-threading on all 4 cores.
3.
On
the
quad-core
processors
the
benchmark
runs about 1.5 times faster in PowerMILL 10.
These benchmark tests can be requested by emailing
PowerMILL10@delcam.com and will also be included
in the PowerMILL examples folder on the installation
DVD.
4. Hardware effects
It is tempting to think that once parallel processing is
supported then the way to improve performance is to
add more and more processors. However, the test
results show that things are not quite that simple. It is
apparent from both performance graphs that the
processor configuration has a significant effect on the
calculation time. It is not immediately obvious why two
dual-core processors are significantly slower than a
single quad-core, and it is surprising that two quad
core processors (eight cores in total) perform worse
than a single quad-core.
The trends we can see in both graphs are:
Figure 7: PowerMILL 10 raster calculation compared with
PowerMILL 9 on different processor configurations.
Write articles.
Edit and collate, to produce the magazine.
4.
Task
Man hours
Write articles
20
Edit magazine
Production time
22
5.
5. Future developments
5.1. Faster toolpath calculations
We expect that future versions of PowerMILL will
give faster overall calculation times in two ways:1. Increasing the amount of multi-threading in the
program. This will improve the overall benchmark
time on dual-core and quad-core machines.
2. Optimising data structures to make better use of
processor
caches. This
will
allow
multi-chip
computers to work more efficiently and will
improve the dual quad-core times significantly.
6.