I'm currently working on a project where we are trying to create a simulation of a biofuel plant. I am trying to look in to any problems which we may encounter in the future. There are several steps in the process of a biofuel plant. Here are two main issues of the project which may cause problems in the future. 1.) Each element is represented as a cluster of characteristics and each element represents one 1kg of some sort of mixture2.) Each step in the overall process is represented using a while loop with a timed loop inside One of the major issues I could see in the future with number one is using up too much memory. The biofuel plant we are basing our simulation off processes around 1 million kg of corn a day. This does not include any other inputs. I ran a simple for loop which enqueued a corn mixture element in to a queue to see the max we could have before running out of memory. The number came out to be about 2.5 million elements. Does anyone know a better way to represent each element? I'm not a 100% how long they will want to be running this simulation, but this max could be met in half a day most likely. Also, is there anyway we could clear memory being used by the queue and output the final product as it comes so it will hopefully not reach this max? I attempted to dequeue each element, write it to a file, and keep going, but this did not seem to free up any space. For issue number two, I am worried about each loop getting a fair amount of processing time. Each loop is not too process intensive, but the more steps then the more while loops that must run. They want it to be as "real-time" as possible, and this was the only solution we could think of. I wasn't sure how LabVIEW schedules multiple while loops, but I have a quad core processor and at least 10-15 while loops and they all seem to run. I am looking for any other possible implementation ideas which may clean up the code or be more efficient. This simulation is going to be intended to be used as a learning tool and give the students an opportunity to control various parts of a simulated biofuel plant. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks,Kevin

LabVIEW

Clear Queue Memory

KKnowles wrote:
They don't all need to be in memory at the same time. Am I not testing the queue correctly? Or if I need that many elements would it make more sense to have an array of clusters instead of the queue. I thought the queue was more efficient and will be better because several processes may be using the same queue or array of data at the same time.

Queues in the traditional sense are intended to apss data from one place to another. recentyl they have been harnessed to allow storage of data since that capacity comes along with their ability to move data.

An engineer I once worked with stated that "queues are almost always nearly full or nearly empty."

In my application I try to keep queues as close to empty as my CPU will permit.

Before i move I I would like to know, "Does your model require more than 2G of data?"

If so you can get up to 3G using a switch for Windows.

If not then I am not sure where we are going with this exploration.

After some more thought...

You may want to take a look at Action Engines as I describe in this thread. They provide storage of data while sharing same between multiple threads.

Just trying to help,

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 04-15-2009 10:19 AM

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