Question on parallel testing 1000 UUT

[NIExpert]

I am starting to consider an architecture for a TS system that needs to handle several hundred, and possibly over a thousand UUT's simultaneously in parallel from a single PC  w 4GB ram

Anyone have examples of such a high socket count system?  Any tips, caveats?  I am concerned about a TS system being capable of that.

I expect that I would need a custom Serial Entry dialog (perhaps table based) and that I would NOT display the exectuion/report window for the UUTS although I may include option to display that for a *specfic* UUT selected by the operator

Regards

Vijay

[~jiggawax~]

1000 is a lot of uuts at one time.  I curious to know what kind of test fixture can support up to 1000 units individually connected at once.  That sounds amazing.

If you use the parallel model and just put a simple step in the sequence and then go to model options and configure it to run 1000 threads and then change it to not open any windows for each thread you will get an error around thread 500.  That doesn't mean that TestStand won't support it.  It just means that what I did is not natively supported. 

If you show the windows then forget about it.  You get a window out of range error after it opens up a bunch of them.

I think you might have to do them in groups.  Basically modify the process model to handle 300 at a time or so.  Even though you kick off the test with 1000 uuts the process model would hold back spawning new executions until so many have completed.  If you did it this way I think you could make it work.  This means that you cannot use the Batch model.

Now if you are just throwing all 1000 units into like a chamber or something and they are not individually connected then I wouldn't spawn all the threads.  I would just run 1 thread and then modify the report generation to create a report for each or if you can just 1 report with all the part numbers on it.

Sounds like an amazing project.  Good luck.

[NIExpert]

I will be testing/characterizing small devices that take MANY days to test and both the fixture and code has to support starting and stopping tests on individual devices...

[LindsW]

Hi,

Take a look at the following KnowledgeBase article that addresses this issue:

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/7D13FCB37920DFF786256B5000063EDA

Regards,

[Daniel-E]

NIExpert,

As Lindsey's link and Jiggawax's tests indicate, there is no hard limit on the number of threads/UUTs you can run at once, but your computer will likely protest well before you hit 1000 UUTs. Even if your machine does not hit an OS-enforced thread limit, memory will become a concern, and the tests will likely take much longer to complete due to your computer's CPU having to split its time between all of these threads.

I agree with Jiggawax that if you want to do this on one machine you would probably be best off doing the tests in waves so that not all 1000 units are being tested at once. It sounds like you'd want the Parallel model so that you can start/stop individual UUTs as needed, and the Parallel model would probably be better suited for this type of approach anyway.

The other option would be to distribute the test to multiple machines. That would allow you to test more devices at once and test them more quickly since the CPUs will not need to switch between as many threads. This approach has a few advantages, for example,you gain hardware redundancy (if a tester goes down, you have other machines that can continue to test). Of course, the trade-off is that there is additional expense in maintaining another tester.

This sounds like an interesting application and I hope you are able to find an approach that best suits your needs. Let us know if you have any more questions about it.

[buton]

Teststand is capable of a lot of stuff if you have the right hardware though...i dont know what you are testing or which instruments you are using for your testing.  if you want to share instruments yo will need to have a big ass matrix also.

but for example if you have to test it through serial port in parallel mode, you will need 1000 USB TO SERIAL converters. i dont know if windows support 1000 COM PORTS.

what you coud do is maybe use a batch model to test  chunks of 100 boards or 50.

[dug9000]

Do you have a thousand instruments/channels to be able to test a thousand uuts at once? If not, then I think you are better of with number of threads more closely corresponding to number of instruments/channels. Perhaps you could have one main controlling thread, that spawns off threads per instrument/channel to test each UUT that hasn't already run a particular test and then as threads/instrument/channel usage completes you could reallocate that instrument/thread to another UUT that hasn't run the test yet. It depends on how complicated your instrument/channel sharing and testing needs are as to whether or not this would be a practical solution.

Hope this helps,

-Doug

[NIExpert]

I guess I am wondering if someone has examples of high UUT count operator interfaces and or serial number dialogs. The native ones don't work (as in take too much space) once you are testing more than a few

I was considering for example of using a table control where each row would display the status of each UUT and also include the option to start/stop the test.    We do have the ability to test multuple devices simultaneously