[Ifeffit] Decrease LCF Fitting Computational Time in Athena

[BradleyW Miller]

Hi, 

I have been given access to a Virtual Machine (VM) with 8 GB of RAM and 4 
CPU's with the hopes of decreasing the time required to do LCF fittings. I 
have large set of environmental samples from different waste streams 
and/or contaminate sources. Currently I have 14 standards and I wanted to 
run a LCF model fitting up to 4 standards. This results in 1456 fits if I 
selected "fit all combinations". This takes about 100 mins. to run 1 
samples (I have 60+ and more coming). 

It appears that Athena is constrained to using at most 25% of the 
available CPU and the physical memory is limited to 22% . 

1) Is there a way I could change Athena's settings to take advantage of 
this VM's multiple CPU's and larger RAM? 

2) Or if Athena can't handle multiple CPU's is there a way to increase the 
maximum percentage of the CPU being used? It appears that Athena is 
limited to accessing up to 25% of the CPU's. One CPU of the four appears 
to be processing a little more data than the other 3 CPU's  (when viewed 
on the Task Manager, Performance tab). When more CPU's were added to the 
VM,  computational time remained similar... if not worse. 

3) Similarly the physical memory is limited to 22% of available memory 
(when viewed on the Task Manager, Performance tab) when Athena is running 
the LCF models as well. Could Athena's setting be changed to increase the 
% of RAM available for LCF fitting?


4) Any other suggestions? 


I spoke with my IT guy who said he believes the software is limiting my 
hopes of decreasing the computational time. I'd love to call it all 
contaminated dirt, rent some big equipment like D-9 dozers, big trucks, a 
couple barges and dump it into the ocean... but we don't have that much 
$$$ for remediation and my kids eat fish. That's is a joke of course... 
my kids don't eat fish  :-)




btw Thanks for your time and for use of the software!

Respectfully,
Bradley W. Miller, Ph.D. 
Post Doctoral Fellow 
Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education
U. S. Environmental Protection Agency
National Risk Management Research Laboratory
Land Remediation and Pollution Control Division
5995 Center Hill Avenue, Cincinnati, OH  45224-1702

www.tinyurl.com/bwmiller

The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of beautiful hypothesis by an 
ugly fact.— Thomas H. Huxley


Views or Opinions expressed in this email is solely representative of the 
sender and does not represents those of the EPA or any other agency. 

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