[aspect-devel] Performance issue with box geometry

[Bart Niday]

Hi everyone,

I’m running simulations in a 3d box, using specified “Repetitions” for a mesh with an unequal number of cells in the X, Y, and Z-directions. When I specify enough repetitions, ASPECT reports spending a lot of time in setup - for a mesh with 1 million nodes, it’s spending 20% of runtime in “Initialization”.
In comparison, with the same parameters and mesh size but without specifying repetitions “Initialization” takes less than 1% of time. From performance it looks like specifying a large number of repetitions causes memory usage problems.

I can get around this by specifying as few repetitions as possible for the aspect ratio I want, and using global mesh refinement instead, but is there a better workaround? 

I attached some minimum parameter files that reproduce this for me. On my cluster, refinement.prm finishes three times as fast as repetitions.prm and repetitions.prm spends two thirds of runtime in “Initialization”.

Thanks,
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Bart Niday
Ph.D. Student
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oregon