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Hi Guys... I've decided I'm going to start offering a VT service and I estimate I could be processing 5 full 360X180's in a day.
My question: I am going to build a dedicated precessing box. Within reason, what specifications would you reccomend for processing of gigapixel pano's. I'm most interested in OS, CPU (32bit / 64bit) speed, RAM, HDD (dual/single - rpm?)
Any advice from users experienced in rendering gigapixel pano's
Many thanks
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If you want to keep it simple and budget is not a problem for you, I would advice a MacPro as it runs seamlessly and no problems of OS, viruses, etc....
You can use it headless and control it through Apple Remote Desktop from any Mac or VNC from Windows or Linux 
It'll be 64 bits, you need as much ram as you can put in it for your budget I think and fast hard-drives (7200rpm would be nice for swap). As you have four slots in MacPro, you can get two in mirror so it's secure for OS and applications, and the two other combined in one large drive so you get high-speed access for swap !
My few ideas 
Vincèn
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Many thanks Vincen...
I'm much more familiar with a Windows OS to be honest. Mainly concerned about Win7 or XP and 32 or 64bit.
Has AutoPano been optimized for 64bit OS?
RAM ~ Are values greater than 4GB going to improve performance much, or is going to prevent out-of-memory errors? (as I've experienced with AutoPano Tour)
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Why not just look at one of the many hardware topics around here, like this one:
http://www.autopano.net/forum/t7852-ult … xel-images
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doceave wrote:
Many thanks Vincen...
I'm much more familiar with a Windows OS to be honest. Mainly concerned about Win7 or XP and 32 or 64bit.
Has AutoPano been optimized for 64bit OS?
RAM ~ Are values greater than 4GB going to improve performance much, or is going to prevent out-of-memory errors? (as I've experienced with AutoPano Tour)
because of memory handling (+3GIG RAM) never think about if 32bit can be a choice for you. 64bit nothing else so win7-64bit no xp32bit (xp64bit dont know it)...
take a motherboard you can start with 8gig ram and has some more slots left to raise to 16+ or 24gig....
plan for source images and destination images and for temp folder seperate harddisc - never use the OS drive if you want to speed things up...
for real speed plan 1 or 2 SSDs instead of HDDs and if money is no limitation take 4 SSDs to make 2 raid 1 ;-)
but you'll also find many postings in autopano forum were HDD Raids with special HDDs are preferred against SSDs...
Liebe Gruesse,
Georg
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I'm still not convinced that some SSDs are better than HDDs. IIRC, velociraptors and WD Black and similar drives max out a 3GB SATA interface, so the only SSDs that may be worthwhile are the ones that plug into the PC's bus.
Note that this assumes you have separate HDDs for 1)system drive 2)system swap space 3)APP Temp and 4) APP input and APP output. This reduces head movement.
Of course, a nice big RAM disk will beat anything else.
As Georg says, forget any 32bit OS. You need a lot of memory for APP, the more the better. And Vista 64 is much more stable than XP 32, but that may just be because I have more memory.
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There's no argument that any decent SSD drive will beat the hell out of any platter disk *in terms of access time and small file random read/writes*. Those two metrics are the most important thing, regarding OS operation (boot time, responsiveness, etc). So if you're building a system today, there's no reason to use a classic HDD for the OS drive.
As for the work drive, it is true that Raptors and WD Blacks provide the best "bang-for-the-buck". They don't really saturate the bus, at least when used separately (RAID is always best). However, in a month or two, motherboards with SATA 6gbps will become much more common and there already are SSD drives with the new SATA bus and then there's no maxing that out at least for now.
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But rotating drives can do some tricks to saturate the 6gbps interface, even if its only using two heads per platter -- this gives a logical cylinder twice as big. and if one head starts halfway into the platter, then the distance the head has to travel is reduced by half.
So either SSD or rotating media, we win!
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