About periodic BC for large mesh in ABAQUS

Hi all,

I'm using ABAQUS-2016 to run a parallel simulation, and I met a problem for assigning periodic BC in large mesh size. I want to make four nodes to be periodic with each other. Normally, I give the node pair in the equation option as:
*Equation
2
nset_1, 2, 1.
nset_2, 2, -1.
*Equation
2
nset_1, 2, 1.
nset_3, 2, -1.
*Equation
2
nset_2, 2, 1.
nset_4, 2, -1.

This works perfect when I have a small mesh. However, when the input file size is probably 1.6GB, this setting will make the ABAQUS pre-processing packager running forever. I'm pretty sure this is a bug within ABAQUS packager, but I don't know if you know some other way to avoid this problem in ABAQUS. 

Thanks for your help!