While necessary and useful, physics-based simulations are often expensive. In addition to increasing approximately with the square of the number of particles, computational runtime for a converged particle packing simulation can vary by orders of magnitude (e.g. 20 CPU min to 20+ CPU hours) as a function of frictional force computations which in turn depend on surface contact area. In general, an appropriate combination of small and large particles leads to additional surface contact area compared to homogeneous particle sizes and high packing fractions. Incidentally, the simulations which are most favorable in terms of high packing fractions are also the most expensive in terms of computational runtime. However, this is not mutually exclusive-computationally expensive simulations can also lead to undesired, low packing fractions. These points suggest the need for efficient optimization of the simulation search space.