title: Maximum percentage of RAM process should used
body: <p><strong>In a nutshell:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I'm a computational scientist and I have an expensive (CPU-time) simulation to run on a computer cluster.</p>
  
  <p>The most CPU-intensive part of my program is a binary tree structure which is used to accelerate my code. The tree grows as the simulation progresses and the bigger the tree the better the performance boost. I know beforehand how big can my binary tree be before my RAM is full.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Details:</strong></p>
  
  <p>The server uses on Red Hat 6.7. </p>
  
  <p>Each node contains:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>12 CPUs: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 0 @ 2.50GHz</li>
  <li>64GB of RAM, 8GB of Swap memory</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>My main part of the code is written in Fortran, while the rest was written in C/C++ - some of the used libraries do not have a Fortran interface. The code is a CFD solver for turbulent reacting flows. I use <a href="https://cantera.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Cantera</a> for the thermodynamic, transport and chemical source terms, <a href="https://www.boost.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Boost library</a> for stiff integrators and then a few Blas/Lapack for matrix operations.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Question:</strong></p>
  
  <p>Should I aim to maximize my RAM (say 99% of available memory) or will it affect CPU performance? If so, what's an optimal % of memory use?</p>