Mesh size: 220 million cells
Farfield Resolution: 2.5 degrees
Simulation Time: 4 hours, 45 minutes
Typical Performance : 320 MCells/s
Power Threshold: -40 dB
Thread Factor: 8
The thread factor setting essentially tells the FDTD engine how many CPU threads to use during [[EM.Tempo]]'s time-marching loop. For a given system, some experimentation may be needed to determine the best number of threads to use. In many cases, using half of the available hardware concurrency works well. This comes from the fact that many modern processors often have two cores per memory port. In other words, for many problems, the FDTD solver cannot load and store data from CPU memory quickly enough to use all the available threads or hardware concurrency. The extra threads remain idle waiting for the data, and a performance hit is incurred due to the increased thread context switching. [[EM.Cube]] will attempt use a version of the FDTD engine optimized for use with Intel's AVX instruction set, which provides a significant performance boost. If AVX is unavailable, a less optimal version of the engine will be used alternatively.