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Author Topic: Mining farm for metashape?  (Read 1672 times)

Igor

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Mining farm for metashape?
« on: November 06, 2019, 05:05:52 PM »
Colleagues, share your experience: does it make sense to buy a 2-year-old mining farm from 13 GTX 1070 with a discount of 50% for calculating orthophotomaps of large volumes (more than 200 GB)? Or is this a stupid undertaking?

Alexey Pasumansky

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Re: Mining farm for metashape?
« Reply #1 on: November 07, 2019, 01:39:04 PM »
Hello Igor,

Currently the following processing stages support GPU-acceleration:
- image matching (first part of Align Photos operation),
- depth maps generation (first part of Build Dense Cloud operation),
- certain steps of the Build Mesh operation when depth maps are selected as a source.
In the upcoming 1.6.0 version also texture blending will support GPU acceleration.

However, the process of the orthorectification and orthomosaic blending will be still performed on CPU. So if the major part of the processing time is spent on the CPU-only operations, there would not be much benefit from using big number of GPU devices.
Best regards,
Alexey Pasumansky,
Agisoft LLC

Igor

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Re: Mining farm for metashape?
« Reply #2 on: November 07, 2019, 03:32:19 PM »
Alex, thank you for the consultation. Another question: if orthomaps and a point cloud are counted on a dual-processor system, with two XEON processors to work, and for floating-point operations, use a GPU? Obviously, on two processors with a large number of cores, processing will occur faster. But does Metashape support multiprocessing?

Alexey Pasumansky

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Re: Mining farm for metashape?
« Reply #3 on: November 07, 2019, 05:20:57 PM »
Hello Igor,

Multi-CPU configurations are supported. However, usually we also suggest to consider the higher CPU quality and not only increase the number of cores. So it's preferred to use 8-16 core CPUs in multi-processor configuration, but with 3.2 GHz frequency, than slow CPUs with 20+ cores.

The GPU-supported operations processing time is usually considerably shorter even with mid-range discrete GPU than on high-end CPU.
Best regards,
Alexey Pasumansky,
Agisoft LLC