Gas microsolvers performance vs Sop solver

[Juraj]

Hi,

I was wondering which nodes to use when working in Dops. Some tasks can be done in Gas microsolvers and Sop solver as well. Which way is faster / more efficient? For example when I want to compute gradient of a field I can use volume analysis sop or gas analysis dop. Also when combining fields I can use gas linear combination or use gas field vop. Another example is advecting particles by vel field - it can be done by gas advect, or in sop solver.

 

Gas microsolvers are designed specifically for some operation - does it mean that they are faster?

 

Thanks,

Juraj

Edited January 3, 2016 by Juraj Tomori

[Annon]

Microsolvers are faster.

Gas analysis is going to give you the data you want efficiently, so defo use those. If there's not a micro solver for what you want, try gasFieldVop, or a wrangle. Last resort is sop solver.

Of course it's up to you. I'll still use sop solvers quite a lot as it's easier to do some things even if it's less efficient, but they CAN be quite a lot slower as you scale up the quality. Depends on what you're doing.

So a gasAnalysis of the gradient will be much faster than a sop solver with a volumeAnalysis calculating the gradient inside.

I have no proof of this, but you could run the performance monitor and test it. Post your results.

[Juraj]

I've done simple setup: advecting particles by pyro sim, computing gradient of density field and trasferring gradient to particles, normalizing gradient attribute on particles.

 

Sop solver setup: Volumeanalysis (compute gradient), Attribfromvolume (transer gradient to particles), Attribvop (normalize)

 

Gas microsolvers setup: Gasmatchfield (create grad field by density), Gasanalysis (compute gradient), Gasfieldtoparticle (transfer to particles), Geometryvop (normalize)

 

Simulation length: 50 frames

Sop solver took 5.122 seconds

Gas microslovers took 3.992 seconds

 

Difference in simulation time is not big probably because of not many simulation frames and low resolution of volumes and low number of particles. But even now microsolvers setup is a little bit faster. If I cranked up all those settings difference would be greater. Also some microsolvers can run on gpu, so it would increase difference I guess.

 

Another thing crossed my mind: is it possible to modify fields in Sop solver? I can import fields into Sop solver using Dop Import but how can I export it back to Dop network?

[Annon]

When you create a SOPSolver, set the data name (the first one, under SOPPath) to the field you want to modify, ie.. "density" etc...