Learning Forum

[designteam2]

I am having a problem where if I run a simulation, the files take up all of the space on my hard drive, which should not be happening as it's an almost empty desktop computer. Running a simulation overnight produced 4000 files. What are the settings to produce less files while still being able analyze the data? 

[Sandeep Medikonda]

What software are you using?

If it is mechanical, You can control what is being written to an extent by going to Analysis Settings > Output Controls and choose the interested output quantity and time to be stored. Please see the help.

Please see these articles:

Article 1

Article 2

Regards,
Sandeep
Guidelines on the Student Community

[designteam2]

I am using the fluent software to perform my simulations.

[Rob]

Have you got Autosave switched on? If so decrease the frequency of the save, ie save every 5 time steps rather than every 1. 

[designteam2]

Yea, I changed my autosave setting so that it saved every 500-time steps, however, I still have large amounts of data in my fluent folder.

[Rob]

Is that because you have many files or that the files are fairly big?  In some of the models I deal with 3-5GB isn't uncommon for a data file, so you can imagine how big (and how quickly we can fill) the hard drives needs to be. 

[designteam2]

I have several cdat files that are tens of thousands of kilobytes large as well as cas files that are thousands of kilobytes large. The program saves about 4 files every minute, but since I am running a simulation for hours, that's thousands of files for one simulation, taking up way too much space.

[Rob]

Yes, that sounds about right. This is why we try and run steady state calculations: less data to process. It's also why we may use simpler models or coarser meshes at times to reduce the storage needs: bear in mind we may be looking at 4-500 million cells in some models and clients run larger grids than that. 

The options you have are to reduce the save interval so you have less files or use a bigger disc. This assumes you're saving with a label ending in .gz as this will autozip the files. Fluent knows what this is, so you'll have   myfile.cas.gz  which will reduce the disc usage too. 

 

[designteam2]

What is the proper way to reduce the save interval to save less files to maybe 1 file every half hour? Where can we change the save interval?

[Rob]

In autosave just change the frequency so the save happens less often: as I don't know how quickly the model runs I can't give a value for this.