My system supports hyperthreading. What is it and will it help my FDS runs?
Hyperthreading enables multi-threaded software applications to execute threads in parallel. In computer terminology, a thread is a SINGLE execution path through a program. A multi-threaded program then has more than one thread running simultaneously. For exmaple, a test version of Smokeview uses one thread to read in data and a second thread to display the scene. As a result, the Smokeview scene does not “lock up” while you are loading data. More generally, programs with CPUs that are hyperthreading enabled allow multi-threaded applications to share resources on the CPU. It has been our experience that FDS is not able to take advantage of hyperthreading. Hyperthreading works best when the application has a mix of floating point, integer and I/O operations. The amount of I/O and integer operations perfomed by FDS are very small compared to the floating point computations, so we would not expect hyperthreading to be of much benefit. This is what we and others have found when running FDS
