Speeding Things Up

If your disk or CPU resources are limited, you might want methods to reduce the execution time of and XSTAR run. Here are some methods:

  1. In most cases, you are interested in the physical conditions in a plasma of fixed composition (usually solar). In this case, you can define the variation type of the composition parameters as zero. This will keep the abundances constant and can reduce the running time by about a factor of twelve.

  2. Keep the number of interpolated parameters at a minimum. Two is usually sufficient. Two interpolated parameters sampled at five points each requires 25 runs of XSTAR. Adding two more parameters at the same sampling requires 625 XSTAR runs. With our sample five minute (optimistically) XSTAR run, that comes out to over 52 hours!