Pops only using 1 core

[Rudinie]

I'm currently doing some particle simulations that require me to do quite a lot of testing and i was wondering if i could speed things up a bit. So i took a look at the perfomance tab in my task manager (windows 7) to see that i've only got 4% cpu usage. There is only one core (out of the 24) that is actually doing something. Clearly i'm using something in my pop-network that has not yet been optimised for multi-cpu or multi-core.

I'm using: source, group, property, state, split, collect, drag, gravity, collision, kill and velocity in my pop.

Does anyone know which one of these is causing 23 cores to idle?

Would there be another way of simulating the animation by using multiple instances? I'm afraid not because every frame needs the information from the previous one i would think.

Why isn't pops multi-core or multi-cpu ready?

I mean i do not want to complain or nag or anything but the first multi-core cpu's were manufactured in 2005 and i can't even remember when the first dual-cpu workstations were made. (googled it, somewhere halfway in 2001 there were 32bit Xeon DP and MP for sale so that would almost be 10 years ago)

Shouldn't it be ultra-top-priority for SESI to make Houdini completely multi-core ready? In my case that would speed up my sims with a factor 20 (given some overhead)

[Macha]

There are only a few multithreaded pops and sops. Try to use vopsop or voppop and avoid creating attributes. Multithreading is also more noticable on heavy pointcounts. At least these are my experiences.

It's a bit of an art to get a multithreaded network. A more fully multithreaded pop context has been requested by many users so hopefully the SESI genies are enthusiastically engineering at it right now!