How much ram storage for openLCA 1.10.2 and ecoinvent 3.6 in Mac is needed?

Question

Hello,  

I am using openLCA 1.10.2 with the database ecoinvent 3.6. After remodeling the project in the GreenDelta-Bottle-Tutorial-1.10 I had the problem that the memory was unsufficient for the calculation. Even when I increased the memory to 6000 MB in the configuration settings it was not enough to calculate the project Water Bottle - PET vs PC Production.   I am using a Mac with the following features:

Processor 2,3 GHz Intel Cor i5

Memory 8 GB 2133 MHz DDr4

Graphics card Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 1536 MB  

How much ram memory do I need to calculate something where I use more product sytsems? Is this a problem just regarding Mac? Or could this be a user problem and what could I do to calculate even more complex product systems/projects?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

(Maybe it is a bit related to this: we just updated the macOS version on the openLCA website. A calculation library was missing.)

The memory usage depends on the calculation type (quick calculation, analysis, ...), the LCIA method, the number of processes in the system (product system > statistics) etc. but it should not be related to macOS. I did not tested the bottle example but a plain ecoinvent 3.6. product system without LCIA method and I could run a full analysis which does a full matrix inversion with ~ 4 GB of memory (it worked without changing the default settings):

In the current version you can download additional libraries for sparse matrix calculations from the start page or via the preferences (Preferences > Configuration):

These libraries only work for the quick calculation but then I could calculate the system with < 800 MB of memory usage:

However, openLCA currently switches to dense matrices when you calculate LCIA results. So the memory usage is higher then (but should be still smaller when you use the quick calculation).