Ok
Finally one simulation finished - the one with displacement input.
Some information that may help
It is a 1/2 model with mirror symmetry (similar to my 1st picture in this thread)
I let some of the CPUs free for other things in case the computer was scheduled to do something else overnight (does it make much difference?)
It was an overnight simulation (no other parallel use)
I set the msengine.exe process as "high" in windows
Processor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1650 v2 @ 3.50GHz, 3501 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)
Creo 2.0 M150
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Run Settings
Memory allocation for block solver: 3072.0
Parallel Processing Status
Parallel task limit for current run: 12
Parallel task limit for current platform: 64
Number of processors detected automatically: 12
Engine Command with the specified command line options:
mech\x86e_win64\bin\msengine.exe b_Contact_Disp_input -i . -w . -solram 3072 -sturm default -results_always -num_threads ALL_BUT_2
Model Type: Three Dimensional
Points: 3031
Edges: 17884
Faces: 28246
Solids: 13393
Elements: 13393
Contacts: 1
Memory and Disk Usage:
Machine Type: Windows 7 64 Service Pack 1
RAM Allocation for Solver (megabytes): 3072.0
Total Elapsed Time (seconds): 49266.76
Total CPU Time (seconds): 60761.50
Maximum Memory Usage (kilobytes): 7821857
Working Directory Disk Usage (kilobytes): 401552
Results Directory Size (kilobytes):
326305 .\b_Contact_Disp_input
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My 1st impression is that the there is no significant bottleneck (although CPU time / Elapsed time could be better - have to check that).
So I´m afraid that there is not much to do to speed-up this type of simulation. Contact is a slow simulation - and this one took almost 17h.
Thus I think I have all the answers now. As final verification an overnight simulation is acceptable. If the goal is optimization it is needed something a lot faster - and as it was explained unfortunately 2D axisymmetric is the wrong simulation for this model.