I agree Neal/Nik,
"9*60*9726 = 5,252,040 instructions have been carried out! Surely that can't
be right no matter how complex the iterations are."
Its been clear from what people have been saying that you don't need a dual core to complete the simulation in 9 minutes. Widely varying machines have been reporting similar durations to complete. oh and btw that should be 5,252,040,000,000 instructions per second (5,252,040 MIPS) - clearly ludicrous. I guess whatever constrains it is not instruction speed or even RAM. In basic terms, above a certain spec, there is no significant benefit.
While I'm no VB expert, it seems we have a script which eats CPU cycles and RAM, as you said.
and I'm guessing the EA protected the code to stop a potential flood of 'hacked'/modified versions of the program being released into the wild by well-meaning coders :-D
Ah well, happy testing.
Cheers,
Dave Fountain
Contaminated Land Officer
East Staffordshire Borough Council
Tel: 01283 508848
Fax: 01283 508890
-----Original Message-----
From: Contaminated Land Management Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Nik
Reynolds
Sent: 15 November 2005 17:34
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: CLEA UK beta version and use thereof
Tested on a Dual 3Ghz Xeon machine with 2GB Ram and as the program hasn't
been optimised for use on a multiple processor machine it only eats 50% of
each CPU, which at least leaves me 50% for other apps such as word and cad,
etc. I can set the affinity of excel.exe process to tell it to only run on
one of the two cpu's in which case that cpu will jump to 100% cpu usage and
leave the other one alone but it still chugs in at 9-10 minutes for one run.
Statistically a 3.2GHz processor at 100% cpu will cary out 9726 MIPS
(Million Instructions Per Second) so after 9minutes:
9*60*9726 = 5,252,040 instructions have been carried out! Surely that can't
be right no matter how complex the iterations are.
All our machines have FULL versions of Office 2003 installed included all
the graphic converters, import/export filters, etc. Without seeing the VB
script that is sitting behind the excel spreadsheet there's nothing more
anyone can do other than keep benchmark testing it on various platforms with
various OS's and versions of office. I'll be seeing what it's like running
on my Apple G4 cube at home running Office 2004 for OS X. Microsoft software
running on Apple hardware and OS may just give a winning result.
I have also tried running excel.exe itself loaded directly into RAM using a
program called RAMDISK, the entire program runs from RAM and no hard disk
activity is registered at all, slightly faster but not much. I have tried
changing settings to optimise RAM for applications and for background
process, left it on windows default setting for pagefile (virtual ram),
specified my own min and max sizes for pagefile and turned the pagefile off
altogether. BIOS is fully up-to-date on all office machines.
"five minutes slower than on my works pc" could be expected, the laptop has
a centrino processor (same Ghz) in which will never be able to out-perform
the P4 in the work's machine, the fact it used so much vram on the laptop
when there was 1GB available for it's is never a good sign of a well written
script.
No 64bit machines in work yet but it really shouldn't need that much power
to carry out the calculations necessary. I myself have a BSc in Computer
Science so know more than my fair about programming in VB, java, and many
more. I have tried to have a quick look at the vb script in the excel file
but as those of you who have tried to look at this too have found out, it's
password protected...?
Regards,
Neil Cooper
Business Manager
Cooper Associates
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