should a GPU , RAM and solid stateHDto speed up giga panorama process?

[HansKeesom]

by HansKeesom » Tue Aug 02, 2011 8:51 pm

If money is no issue, then get 32gb of ram, get two SSD'sm one for the OS/APPs and one for scratch/temp disk get 2x 2TB disk WD RE4 / for your data storage in a soft RAID-1

thanks man!
this is what i'm looking for
32 GB ram 1000 $
2 SSD 1000 $

one virtual tour should cover the price

and the GPU is like you say (not useful) ! waw! thanks man, I would have fallen for that!

hmmmm well paid tours, Can I work for you :-) I can process everything for you at lower rates :-)

[UK Pano]

by UK Pano » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:23 pm

Thanks both - both interesting inputs which I have taken onboard, especially your formula. Duly copied and printed off with all my other panorama notes!

Completely off topic but picking your brains, when rendering from APG for then importing into PTP for creating a tour, what is best in the following?

Would you render out of APG at the maximum resolution of the stitched panorama or would you render at a reduced size of 6000x3000 for example?

Cheers

[HansKeesom]

by HansKeesom » Tue Aug 02, 2011 11:17 pm

Thanks both - both interesting inputs which I have taken onboard, especially your formula. Duly copied and printed off with all my other panorama notes!

Completely off topic but picking your brains, when rendering from APG for then importing into PTP for creating a tour, what is best in the following?

Would you render out of APG at the maximum resolution of the stitched panorama or would you render at a reduced size of 6000x3000 for example?

Cheers

Never gave it a thought, always use maximum resolution. See no reason not to do so. If you want the panorama to load faster PTP has options for that.

[[bo]]

by [bo] » Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:37 am

32 GB ram 1000 $
2 SSD 1000 $
one virtual tour should cover the price

hmmmm well paid tours, Can I work for you :-) I can process everything for you at lower rates :-)

The day I start getting USD 2000 for a tour, I'll stop working on everything else... I envy you for your clients!

[KreAture]

by KreAture » Wed Aug 03, 2011 3:54 pm

When selling a $500,000+ house it will probably pay to use a pano-tour at $1000-2000 as it will attract a lot more bidders.

[HansKeesom]

by HansKeesom » Wed Aug 03, 2011 4:39 pm

When selling a $500,000+ house it will probably pay to use a pano-tour at $1000-2000 as it will attract a lot more bidders.

But then the house is sold by a real-estate agent that get's a certain commission and does not want to spend it on a panoramic tour and rather takes some photos or does the panoramas himself.

[KreAture]

by KreAture » Wed Aug 03, 2011 5:46 pm

And doesn't draw any noticeable crowd, getting a lower commission and end up loosing money...
Don't forget the time it takes to make the pano.

[tived]

by tived » Thu Aug 11, 2011 6:00 am

Hi Guys,

Sorry for my absense, I can see we are having a few issues again on this topic which have been covered in length here.

In an ideal world where we have no limitations in $$$, we can design systems that will eliminate bottlenecks in the pano production. From this we deduct a lessor system which fits within our available funds.

Look at the data travelling through your system, as it has to move from the different stages, moving data to and from its host drive set takes longer then moving data from host drive set to the next drive set. With this idea in mind, you have to build a system with multiple hard drives or drive sets (RAID). The more we can separate each task the faster we can make the system.

To SSD or not to SSD? is only a question of money, as the SSD's in particular the 3rd Gen is very very fast, so if you can afford SSD's then go for it.

This applies to most OS's, Mac/PC and *nix

Have your OS/Applications on one set of disks - eg. The Bootdisk, i currently use two SSD's (2nd Gen) in RAID-0 i would prefer to have 4 SSD's for this or more simpli for the speed, these can be very small disks but they should atleast sum up to 120GB, or big enough to store your OS and your apps with spare space left.

There are guys who build systems for database handling and use 8 or more SSD disks and they are able to get speed of up or greater the 2GB/sec which is very fast :-) they then also you several sets like this for their various tasks, but they make sure that all sets equally fast and this is an important thing, as the system is only as fast as its slowest link.

Page-file, again this is something that both windows and Mac OS uses, but have different names for it, again here you need to accommodate for this, as no matter how much ram you have you will always need this temp-swap space for your OS. I here use 3 SSD's 2nd Gen in RAID-0, again to optimise speed, ideally it should be made up of many more disks but not enough $$$$

Temp/Scratch disk: the same as with the page-file, you can combine these to save some $$$$, but if it is possible then separate in a RAID-0 set, and again the more drives the faster it is.

Finally we came to the storage of the data, here if you have the $$$ you could use SSD's but in all honesty i would use large HDD in a stripe and mirror RAID combination.... this is not so that you do not have to back up your data because you have to do this regardless - not that I always practice what I preech, but you really should!

Now we are talking of the ideal situation here, where you make large pano's and hopefully are also making some money from it. The above WILL give you the best data flow!

All the best

Henrik

[KreAture]

by KreAture » Thu Aug 11, 2011 7:33 am

APx appears to only start swapping if you set "use memory" too high.
It uses it's own scratch system instead.

[tived]

by tived » Thu Aug 11, 2011 7:48 am

Hi KreAture,

It sure does use its own :-) and therefor you will need to provide it with a home, such as a set of very fast disks.

I don't know about when it starts to use it, but it will eventually use it, depending on the size of your pano, obviously if you are just doing 6-8 shot sphears you may not need to go to this extend with multiple disks.

I know that I need to use the scratch disk despite of having 48GB of ram

Henrik

[HansKeesom]

by HansKeesom » Thu Aug 11, 2011 9:15 am

Hi Guys,

Sorry for my absense, I can see we are having a few issues again on this topic which have been covered in length here.

In an ideal world where we have no limitations in $$$, we can design systems that will eliminate bottlenecks in the pano production. From this we deduct a lessor system which fits within our available funds.

Look at the data travelling through your system, as it has to move from the different stages, moving data to and from its host drive set takes longer then moving data from host drive set to the next drive set. With this idea in mind, you have to build a system with multiple hard drives or drive sets (RAID). The more we can separate each task the faster we can make the system.

To SSD or not to SSD? is only a question of money, as the SSD's in particular the 3rd Gen is very very fast, so if you can afford SSD's then go for it.

This applies to most OS's, Mac/PC and *nix

Have your OS/Applications on one set of disks - eg. The Bootdisk, i currently use two SSD's (2nd Gen) in RAID-0 i would prefer to have 4 SSD's for this or more simpli for the speed, these can be very small disks but they should atleast sum up to 120GB, or big enough to store your OS and your apps with spare space left.

There are guys who build systems for database handling and use 8 or more SSD disks and they are able to get speed of up or greater the 2GB/sec which is very fast :-) they then also you several sets like this for their various tasks, but they make sure that all sets equally fast and this is an important thing, as the system is only as fast as its slowest link.

Page-file, again this is something that both windows and Mac OS uses, but have different names for it, again here you need to accommodate for this, as no matter how much ram you have you will always need this temp-swap space for your OS. I here use 3 SSD's 2nd Gen in RAID-0, again to optimise speed, ideally it should be made up of many more disks but not enough $$$$

Temp/Scratch disk: the same as with the page-file, you can combine these to save some $$$$, but if it is possible then separate in a RAID-0 set, and again the more drives the faster it is.

Finally we came to the storage of the data, here if you have the $$$ you could use SSD's but in all honesty i would use large HDD in a stripe and mirror RAID combination.... this is not so that you do not have to back up your data because you have to do this regardless - not that I always practice what I preech, but you really should!

Now we are talking of the ideal situation here, where you make large pano's and hopefully are also making some money from it. The above WILL give you the best data flow!

All the best

Henrik

Henrik,

Thanks for the extra information.
Although the subject has indeed been discussed multiple times, message #23 clearly contains something new and important, which is :

1 : a formula to calculate the maximum amount of memory one needs.
2 : a description of what will happen and advice on what to do if one can only have a certain part of the calculated memory.

Your message is absolute of great value but does not supply someone that wants to build a new system with concrete numbers.

regards,

Hans Keesom

[tived]

by tived » Thu Aug 11, 2011 10:26 am

Hi Hans,

Thanks - (sorry didn't read that post - shame on me! :-) )

I think it will be really hard to provide specific numbers, unless you always do the same thing everytime.

We can of course calculate the size of a given pano and its associated files, then calculate how fast a given setup is which will give you a rendering time of x seconds and minutes.

anyway, my apologies if I missed the point - feeling a bit sideways today ;-)

Henrik

PS: It can never be too fast! :-)

[HansKeesom]

by HansKeesom » Thu Aug 11, 2011 10:53 am

Hi Henrik,

No worry, we will jump in when needed.

Of course you can never be sure about the last details, but the formula helps to get an idea of what one would need for a certain sized panorama and what one can expect from a certain sized computer.
The formula (1), made by Kreature, is what one could call the system requirements. My description (2) helps to both make decisions on what to buy and what to expect given a panorama and a machine. Your message goes into details of SSD and RAID which is of course very valid and can be considered an important step nr 3 after the above steps (1) and (2) have been done.

We are getting there :-)

We can now put together the following ( I replaced "i" by "some" in your text to make it more general and added it as step (3)
====================================================================
System requirements
The system requirement depend on the size of the panorama one photographs

Step (1)
first calculate the scratch space using the formula

"<input image rez> * 4 * <input image count> = scratch"
for example, shooting at 16,2 megapixel, making 1098 photos we calculate 16.2 * 1098 * 4 = 71150.4 MB or 69.48 GB

[WARNING added 27/07/2013 : when one does not have a 1:1 machine or better, some functions like fusion might not work. Actually I am rather sure about this might say "will not work"]
Step (2)
We compare the the scratch needed to the memory we have, so "memory you have : scratch as calculated"

-1:1 :If you have as many GB's RAM as scratch calculated, you have more then enough RAM, no need to add anymore. Autopano problably will not even use the temp-directory. This is really a dreamsystem.

-1:2 : if you have only half the GB's RAM of what was calculated you will be able to detect, edit and render your panorama's in a decent time. This is a normal system and good workable.
You might hear your harddisk a lot, If you have the money and your computer allows it, you will enjoy buying enough RAM to go to the 1:1-situation above.
Alternatively you can consider buying a SSD to be used as first temp-directory in the settings. Any size SSD will help as you can still use your normal harddisk as second and third temp directory. To keep things speedy however you want a ssd at least the size of the calculated scratch size (minus the RAM you have).

-1:n with n = 3 or 4 Autopano will get the job done but you will experience it takes much longer to get things done. If you are on a budget and/or not making money with your panoramas, there is likely no real hurry to upgrade. Otherwise think about upgrading your RAM to get a better 1:n or adding a SSD as temp.

-1:n with n >4 (F.e. you have 2 GB RAM and use a 12 mm equivalent lens) Autpano will have a hard time getting your job done and is even likely not able to finish the job.

Warning : check to see whether you motherboard can take the memory and whether the operating system you are using can address it. If not, go for a SSD

Step (3) Some general thought to put things in context

In an ideal world where we have no limitations in $$$, we can design systems that will eliminate bottlenecks in the pano production. From this we deduct a lessor system which fits within our available funds.

Look at the data travelling through your system, as it has to move from the different stages, moving data to and from its host drive set takes longer then moving data from host drive set to the next drive set. With this idea in mind, you have to build a system with multiple hard drives or drive sets (RAID). The more we can separate each task the faster we can make the system.

To SSD or not to SSD? is only a question of money, as the SSD's in particular the 3rd Gen is very very fast, so if you can afford SSD's then go for it.

This applies to most OS's, Mac/PC and *nix

Have your OS/Applications on one set of disks - eg. The Bootdisk (, Some use two SSD's (2nd Gen) in RAID-0, some would prefer to have 4 SSD's for this or more simpli for the speed, these can be very small disks but they should atleast sum up to 120GB, or big enough to store your OS and your apps with spare space left.)

There are people who build systems for database handling and use 8 or more SSD disks and they are able to get speed of up or greater the 2GB/sec which is very fast :-) they then also use several sets like this for their various tasks, but they make sure that all sets equally fast and this is an important thing, as the system is only as fast as its slowest link.

Page-file, again this is something that both windows and Mac OS uses, but have different names for it, again here you need to accommodate for this, as no matter how much ram you have you will always need this temp-swap space for your OS. (Some here uses 3 SSD's 2nd Gen in RAID-0, again to optimise speed, ideally it should be made up of many more disks but not enough $$$$)

Temp/Scratch disk: the same as with the page-file, you can combine these to save some $$$$, but if it is possible then separate in a RAID-0 set, and again the more drives the faster it is.

Finally we came to the storage of the data, here if you have the $$$ you could use SSD's (but in all honesty many use large HDD (some in a stripe and mirror RAID combination.... this is not so that you do not have to back up your data because you have to do this regardless - not that we always practice what we preech, but you really should!

===================================================================

Autopano can copy this and use it as general advice.

We still need to do a part about CPU and GPU......or are these of lesser importance?

Last edited by HansKeesom on Sat Jul 27, 2013 8:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

[KreAture]

by KreAture » Thu Aug 11, 2011 5:13 pm

GPU is currently only used by the editor.
When they get the renderer up and running with GPU it will need to be benchmarked before we know who is faster, and by how much.
Best would be for it to use both GPU and CPU ofcource as then all the computingpower is utilized.

I would like to comment on the os and raid and SSD stuff ppl sprout from time to time too.
I have tried it and did not notice any change with OS on raid or SSD. OS is supposed to be finished loading and only do caching with available free memory while you render, so there is no point in wasting expensive SSD on it. Sure, it boots faster, but once that is done and you saved 20 seconds, the money is just wasted while it renders for n hours or days...

The swap is noticable only if you set the mem usage too high as then it will swap. If not it will simply not need swap and will use scratch as intended.

I tried monitoring swap space and i/o activity to see what happened and it really doesn't use it with the normal settings. If you start loading tonns of browsers and maby even photoshop while you are rendering then it will swap like crazy. You need to start whatever you want to have running simultaneously with the render first, and then configure APx and restart it. Only then will it use the right settings to allow simultaneous use of the machine. (And your pano will render a lot slower.) I have two computers instead! One for internet/mail/IRC etc and one for video/pano editing.
When rendering I do not use the machine for anything but the rendering. I maximize available memory and avoid starting additional apps.

[HansKeesom]

by HansKeesom » Thu Aug 11, 2011 5:30 pm

Hi Kreature,

I am absolutely with you on seeing little need to install OS (and or software) on SSD. If people want to do so, they can but it is not gonna be of much influence.

Different people have different usage, I use my machine for all kind of things while rendering, it is running a webserver, media-center, my email etc. In earlier version I could reduce the rendering priority, now I need to turn of one of the cores of my i7. It still works good enough for me. For long jobs, the computer can run through the night of course and I close application before going to bed.

[KreAture]

by KreAture » Thu Aug 11, 2011 5:43 pm

Btw Hans... I just realized your tag... You'd have charged me €1098 for my large pano haha. (Edit it was 1098 images, not 2214)
http://kreature.org/oslo/oslo_from_ekeberg_2011-07-28_420mm_dehazed.htm

Edit:
My new i7 comp did it in about 2 hours.

Last edited by KreAture on Thu Aug 11, 2011 7:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[HansKeesom]

by HansKeesom » Thu Aug 11, 2011 6:14 pm

Hi Kreature,

To see if that is reasonble, send me (a link to) the source-files and I will process them for you and keep the time.

Of course, for you I will do it for free

cheers,

Hans

[Ronald]

by Ronald » Sat Aug 13, 2011 6:46 pm

I'm agreed with some of the comments about how increase the APP/APG performance. My experience using APP tells me that the best way to increase dramatically the performance during the rendering process is using a RAID-0 system using many HDD's as your system support, and a lot of RAM.

I have no idea about how easily you could modify a MAC system (because I'm INTEL guy); but I can tell you this...

Regardless of the HDD technology SATA/SAS or SSD, a RAID-0 sytem must be part of the computer configuration to render big panos. In the same way an increased amount of RAM.

I'm disagree with some comments about how you can configure you set of HDD's to increase the system performance; to me, the best way to increase the performance is having everything in the same drive; because, when you're using different volumes for scracth, OS, temp, images, etc, the system needs to transfers files trough the drives which requires time and will affect the processing time, the RAM is affected in the same way, more RAM means less transfers between disk and memory.

I have a system with 6 (500GB) SATA disks in a RAID-0 configuration, 2 CPU's (8 cores) and 24GB RAM, nothing fancy or pretty (in fact is very noisy system), BUT, I am able to render a panorama of 40237 x 10573 pixels and generate a photoshop file of 6.33GB (PSB 16bits, Exposure Fusion, Multiband, Spline 64) in about 30 minutes.

My final recommmendation is: put all the HDD's supported in a RAID-0 configuration and one volume, and install the max RAM supported by your system, as well.

[HansKeesom]

by HansKeesom » Sat Aug 13, 2011 9:03 pm

Hi Ronald,

One thing I like about using SSD is that it makes your system less noisy, especially during rendering. :-)

Of course having everything faster and bigger is a good thing. In the real world we have to balance things and choose carefully what we invest in.
I wonder whether the money spend on the 6 SATA disks would have been better spend on a nice SSD, something like this http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-ssd,2952-3.html

[Ronald]

by Ronald » Sat Aug 13, 2011 10:34 pm

The cooling system is the one that generates all the noise, and that's fine because the performance in cool is better than a hot one.

Looking the specs of that controller, my PERC 6/i 512MB makes me cry!

In the other hand, there is no way that you can compare the performance of one disk vs an array of disks...

[KreAture]

by KreAture » Sat Aug 13, 2011 10:47 pm

Ronald there is a important factor you forget.
If you have everything on one disk/array that disk/array will have less bandwidth than if it was seperate.
This is especially true for scratch. There is a lot of random scratch access going on when you run big panos, and if swap and os access as well as final file goes on that disk too, they will interfere.
There will always be a read from scratch and a write to destination regardless of how you do it. The final image appears to never be written fully to scratch first, then copied, but instead seems to be assembled to the final destination as part of compression etc.

Also, with SSD's as costly as they are you'd need a lot more room to have OS and swap there as well.
I tried swap of 20 GB as well as scratch on a 120 GB disk and it overflowed the scratch with 16 GB to the slower normal disk. This led to a 23 hour render even though swap wasn't acced much ast all.
Then I removed the swap and left it on a slow disk, and left the entire 120 GB to scratch allowing it to keep all data on fast SSD. Result was a 1 hour 52 minute render of same file.
If you can afford a set of SSD's that are so much bigger than your projects requirements that you can fit os there it may be fine, but if not or you save money by getting a ssd big enough for your scratch only.

[Ronald]

by Ronald » Sun Aug 14, 2011 1:54 am

Since I bought APP 1.4.2, I been trying to find the combination to get the best possible performance during the panorama generation.

I been trying to use many forum recommendations according to my budget (CPU/RAM/HDD/RAID) and
so far the best configuration (at least for me), is using all the (6) disks in a RAID-0 combination. The only detail is that RAID-0 was specially tweaked for big files (the computer is exclusive for APP) and I'm really happy with this performance.

I could try setup a computer used previously, (see disk performance http://www.kolor.com/forum/p73648-2010-12-04-05-40-28#p73648) and try to find out a better configuration; but again, (at least for me), splitting the hdd's does not improve performance during the rendering process.

A combination of the next generation of RAID controller using SSD would be great, but, unfortunatelly it's out scope for me.

[KreAture]

by KreAture » Sun Aug 14, 2011 2:39 am

True Ronald, 6 disks in raid will be faster than 5 disks in raid. That is why you see this particular benefit.
Since the OS doesn't interfere with swap due to the scratch system the bandwidth isn't compromized either.

My point only becomes valid for very high bandwidth disks which saturates their controller alone. IN fact they can saturate the controller so the second disk on there won't get enough bandwidth either making raid only work when you use two dedicated controller ports and raid via sw, or use a hw raid controller with dedicated ports and enough internal bandwidth to handle it.

What is valid however is the fact that $120 GB ssd is expensive, and for me, my panos require 100+ GB scratch making it a disaster if something else also uses space from that disk.
Buying two of them however will allow a doubling of speed and capacity, and then I would certainly waste some space for the swap. It is however twice as expensive...

[HansKeesom]

by HansKeesom » Sun Aug 14, 2011 3:26 pm

From a CPU-viewpoint, isn't this all about two things?
1 : get the fastest CPU you can get
2: make sure it runs close to 100% during the times you are waiting for it, so you need to wait as short as possible.

If you do not want to buy a new system you can skip step 1.
Step 2 is about feeding enough data to the CPU and making sure processed data is moved away as fast as possible.
If currently Autopano is often using less then 25% of your CPU, there is a lot that can be done, if you are running above 75% there is little that can be done?

[KreAture]

by KreAture » Sun Aug 14, 2011 3:57 pm

Yes Hans, I think that is what I saw too.
With my normal setup I often had only 17% load due to disk-bottlenecks.
Now with the SSD it's at 80-100% all the time.