Description: Many instances of performance bottlenecks and excessive memory usage have been removed from batch preprocessing and initialization associated with Abaqus/Standard and Abaqus/Explicit. The improvements tend to be most significant for models with one or more of the following characteristics:

• large number of part instances;

• large number of contact pairs, surface-based tie pairings, or fasteners;

• large number of material orientations;

• large number of boundary conditions;

• large number of film conditions;

• general contact involving a large fraction of nodes in a model;

• submodel analysis.

These performance improvements build on improvements that were made in Abaqus 6.11. Figure 2–1 shows batch preprocessing times across three Abaqus releases for an example involving an array of blocks tied to a flat surface. Data points for models with different numbers of blocks are shown in these plots. Each block is a separate instance of the same part definition, so the overall model size scales linearly with the number of blocks.

The largest model considered has ten thousand blocks that are each modeled with one thousand incompatible mode elements (element type C3D8I), such that the overall model has 170 million variables (including internal degrees of freedom associated with C3D8I elements). As shown in Figure 2–1, the batch preprocessing time has decreased significantly in recent releases, especially as the model size increases. Data points are not shown for the largest models in previous releases because memory limits were reached during batch preprocessing in these cases. Memory usage reductions enable these models to run successfully with Abaqus 6.12.