Solve Section

This section contains the parameters and controls for actually calculating the USMN solution. They are summarized below:

 

NVIDIA CUDA Devices

Using NVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) cores for USMN calculations provides an enhanced parallel processing option. It allows the use of the hundreds to thousands of cores contained within the GPU. On a decent NVidia graphics card (or alternately a Tesla module) this can significantly reduce the solve time for larger USMN networks. This requires a quality card and 64-bit SA.

There is an on/off option for this setting as a right-click function on the Solve button. This will activate CUDA devices if any are present and save the configuration to the registry so that it will persist between jobs. When CUDA devices are enabled/disabled, this transaction is logged so that the user can inspect the log for status.

Small USMN systems will not benefit from using CUDA devices. Each USMN solution sequence will take approximately 4 iterations to complete and the setup time to initialize and transfer data to the NVIDIA CUDA device simply adds more overhead time than is gained. So even if CUDA processing is enabled it will be ignored if an iteration takes less than 2 seconds.

Large USMN systems (30 instruments or more with 30 points or more per instrument) will benefit greatly from using NVIDIA CUDA devices.

A test showed the following results:

A network featuring 551 instruments with an average of 30 points per instrument and solving this system on a dual XEON (8 CPU cores) running at 2.39 GHz required 40 hours to solve (5 iterations at ~8 hours each). Solving this same system using NVIDIA CUDA devices (QUADRO P6000) reduced the solution time from 40 hours to 23 minutes.