Forums » CircuitLab Feature Requests

The short of it:

Circuit Lab would benefit from multithreaded simulations in Time Domain Sweeps. Because these sweeps are entirely independent from one another, they are a perfect candidate for multithreaded computing.

My situation:

I have recently been using Circuit Lab to optimize some niche power supply circuitry and been using a lot of sweeps. Because of the oscillatory nature of my circuits I need to have a very fine time step to allow the oscillations to occur and get good simulation data. I also need to see a fairly long period of time (A dozen or so oscillations) to make sure that the circuit steadies out to the desired configuration. Combine these with a few steps of a parameter sweep and you have a perfect storm of computational load.

These simulations have taken between 20 minutes and a couple hours for my circuit. They generate between hundreds of thousands and tens of millions of data points. I think that a fairly simple master - worker threading routine would make these sweeps take dramatically less time (due to better multi-core processor utilization) and I would love to see this feature added.