On Oct 18, 2008, at 2:13 PM, Manav Bhatia wrote:

> I am curious about this: doesn't any nonlinear transient computation
> require this information per element per iteration? Am I the first one
> to consider caching this information? How do the CPU/memory overheads
> for your problems work out?

This _really_ depends on your application.  For a lot of my  
applications that I've solved fully implicit with newtons method and  
fairly large timesteps... solving the linear systems takes up a LOT  
more time than reinit().

On the other hand if you're solving either explicitly or using very  
small timesteps so your linear systems are pretty easy to solve... I  
could see how reinit could start taking up more solve time.

Currently, I do everything Jacobian Free... which means I'm evaluating  
my residual _millions_ of times (even during the actual linear  
solve).  In this case I'm solving fairly large (6 or 7 variables)  
systems, so doing one FE reinit to evaluate the residual for 7  
equations isn't too bad.  Currently we're spending about 50 to 60  
percent of our runtime just evaluating residuals... and only about 15%  
of our runtime is coming from reinit() like activities (and that  
includes re-calculating the value and gradient of all of our variables  
at every quadrature point).

In my case though... a lot of our computational time goes into  
calculating highly non-linear material properties... some of which  
even have Fourier series to evaluate at every quadrature point.  Along  
with very tight coupling between the variables that also has to be  
evaluated.

What I'm getting at here is that there are lots of ways to spend  
computational time... and it is _very_ application dependent.  I'm  
personally not worried about how long FE::reinit() is taking because I  
know for a fact that it has been uber-optimized by Roy (and others)  
and I'm confident that all of the calculations happening in there are  
absolutely necessary.

All of that said... I am interested to hear about it if you get this  
FE caching stuff to work...

Derek

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