Ultimate hardware set

RE: Ultimate hardware set

Dennis Nikolaev — Sun, 29 Jan 2017 04:34:01 GMT

1. To speed up Reconstruction - we need best Graphics cards + fast cores and as MANY engines as we can afford.
To speed up Aerotriangulation with need a Xeon processor (on the leading PC) with largest number of cores we can afford right?

Xeon E5-2679 with 20 cores @2.5 Ghz should be the AT beast. (are multiple processors supported?)

2. Does AT use much memory? or 64Gb will be plenty enough?

3. if considering building a farm of several PCs, is it necessary to have 64Gb on every computer? I'm thinking, perhaps just reducing a tile size (during reconstruction) will allow even 16Gb PCs to process a job with same speed as 64Gb PCs? (If smaller tiles process slightly slower: by how many%? please put it in perspective for us. Let say 64Gb vs 32 Gb vs 16 Gb)

4. How to determine a suitable tile size based on memory available? By the rule of thumb I was trying to have each tile to be less then 1/3 of my total RAM. Still once in a while I get a fail on a tile. What is a fail proof ratio?

RE: Ultimate hardware set

Dennis Nikolaev — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 09:20:56 GMT

What kabylake processor might be suitable?

RE: Ultimate hardware set

Casey Bentley — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 19:06:36 GMT

Sorry, I dont have a Pascal Titan to test. The 1080 will score a 215 though with a 6700k which should definitely put you on the upper end of the 10-20 gigapixels per day that we estimate per engine. I would assume the Kabylake chips score even better.

For something that big, having multiple engines might be beneficial. This way you can parallelize the reconstruction step, which is the most time consuming.

RE: Ultimate hardware set

Dennis Nikolaev — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 13:41:28 GMT

I was bidding on a 41 km2 project for 5 cm/pix. That's why I needed an ultimate PC. Unfortunately, lost the bid. According to the client, the winner offered production time much less then 1 month (((.

RE: Ultimate hardware set

Dennis Nikolaev — Thu, 19 Jan 2017 13:36:57 GMT

This is exactly the answer I was looking for. If anyone has Titan X (pascal), please post your score.

RE: Ultimate hardware set

Casey Bentley — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 17:01:11 GMT

How big are the projects you will be working on? Your assumptions about the CPU are correct, though its worth noting that for projects with lots of photos/pixels, it might be worth having a few more threads for the AT. For RC though, clock speed is most important and those unlocked i7 XXXXk chips are great for it. I havent gotten a Kabylake chip to test yet but the Skylake chip I have performs very well, especially for the reconstruction.

Also havent gotten the chance to test the new Titan X, but based on the benchmarks I have seen, im not sure its worth the extra cost. the 1080 performs very well ( scores 215+ w/ a 6700k) and it has been rumored for awhile that a 1080 TI will be released soon.

I have tested a couple different RAM configs and haven't noticed any significant differences.

Drive speed does make a difference. storing everything on an SSD will make a world of difference. Havent gotten the chance to personally test the difference between SATA vs M.2 but I have heard the difference is negligible.

RE: Ultimate hardware set

Dennis Nikolaev — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 01:25:04 GMT

CPU
For example Xeon e5-2679 @2.5 Ghz $2'702 (20cores) shows the highest PassMark score of 25'236
However i-7 7700k @4.2 Ghz $350 (4 cores) shows PassMark 12'327

# of cores is good for Aerotriangulation. Ghz speed is good for reconstruction
since Reconstructions count for 90% of project processing the i7@4.2 Ghz will be faster for the overall result.
Is this assumption right?

GPU
new nVidia Titan X with 12Gb for $1'200 seams to be the ultimate choice (not the GTX titan X)
with nVidia GTX 1080 8Gb $569 is 2nd best
Right? Multiple GPUs are not supported right?

How about RAM, what kind is currently the best? how much RAM is excessive?

I assume just about any SSD will do?

How to pick a motherboard?

With clients ever pressing harder for time, the optimal PC configuration directly relates to wing or loosing jobs.
Ideal result for this post would be Felix or other CC experts posting specs for the ultimate CC station for January 2017.