Help Leveraging a Linux HPC Cluster's Processing Power for Agisoft Metashape

[Dr_C]

Greetings Agisoft Community! I am writing to seek your advice about how to best leverage the power of a Linux HPC cluster with Agisoft Metashape for a new drone imagery project. I know it is possible to deploy Metashape in an HPC environment, but I do not know how such a decision will influence my workflow or existing software license. Please see a brief overview of the project, the Linux cluster details, and my specific questions below:

Project Overview
1) We will collect drone imagery with a DJI 4 Pro for 3 to 4 sites (~1 square kilometer each)  to create orthomosaics for each site. We have not yet determined the target pixel size, but I conservatively estimate each site will require >500 images.
2) The resulting orthomosaic pixels will be sampled for a deep learning algorithm to classify irrigated and non-irrigated agricultural fields.
3) The immediate project does not require a point cloud, but I would like to produce a sparse point cloud in the future.

Situation
1)I have a single node-locked Educational License for Agisoft Photoscan from about 5 years ago that I plan to reactive once I find the best configuration for the software.
2) My current office machine (Windows 10 box) is about 7 years old and does not have sufficient computing resources to process the images for my project (16 GB DDR3; ATI Radeon 7500 w/ 64GB memory and 128 bit bus; CPU: Intel i7 3370 3.4 GHz (without turbo).
3) However, my campus has an HPC Linux Cluster with the following specs:

• CentOS Linux release 7.5.1804 (Core)/li]
  
  • 8 nodes (1 Head, 7 Computing), 16 CPUs (192 cores), 768GB RAM (DDR4-2666, 40TB of storage/li]
    
    • Job Handler: SLURM
    • Remote account access only from campus network
    
    Questions:
    1) Is it possible to access the Metashape GUI if the software is installed directly on the HPC Cluster? I will still need access to the GUI tools.
    2) Can a standard GUI Metashape install on a Windows machine send and receive remote calls to a Linux HPC cluster for image processing with SLURM?
    
    Summary:
    Ideally I would like to be able to use the front-end GUI, but benefit from the processing power of the Linux HPC cluster.
    
    Apologies for my ignorance, and thank you for your help!
    
    -Matt
    
    

[jslyder]

Hi Dr_C,

I use Metashape on a linux-based HPC cluster regularly at work.  I'll admit I'm largely ignorant on the nuts and bolts of how Metashape has been deployed in this setting, but I can comment on a few of your questions.  For licensing, it is my understanding that each individual processing node will require a license, so depending on the configuration you would likely need a few licenses to really take advantage of your HPC setup.  We have a floating license server with up to 60 licenses, so for us this is not an issue. 

As for the GUI, yes, you can access this.  I'm not sure about how it would work to send/receive calls from your windows machine, I imagine that would be possible depending on how your network was set up.  In our organization, however, Metashape is set up within the HPC cluster and we simply use a browser-based remote session to interact with this GUI. 

[Dr_C]

Jslyder,

Thank you for your thoughtful and encouraging response to my question! I think your feedback helped my IT colleague find a potential solution for my Metashape HPC deployment and use. I think you may also be correct about the licensing requirements for an HPC environment. I will have to further investigate the specific circumstances for my HPC set up and project needs. Thank you again for your help, and I will contribute my findings here when I find a permanent solution.

Best,
Matt