Even though I have a valid installation of Microsoft MPI statement PARALLEL=n seems not to be working, although acquiring n number of licences when asked.
Do not use it with 1 cpu; you may not see any performance benefit as it uses single core. As it uses the parallel algorithms on one processor so license been pulled up.
If you are interested to learn more about Parallel options with different solution sequence and example showing performance, check MSC.Nastran High Performance Computing User’s Guide. There is a chapter on SOL400 parallel option as well.
I need to look at your log and f04 files, is the job big enough to get benefit of parallel=8; Good to log a case with MSC Support with log and f04 files.
This is a very small job with 17682 DOF. On such smaller models, SMP in my experience actually hurts, as the overhead to manage the SMP is higher than the performance gains.
