Quote:
Originally Posted by Camelopardalis
Most astro software isn't multithreaded enough to make use of more than about 4 cores. I've profiled PixInsight while performing typical image processing tasks and it doesn't saturate all the cores on my i7 all the time. High throughput storage and lots of it is essential though.
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This is interesting.
I just ran a benchmark in PI on my workstation (2x10 core Xeon E5) and the most I saw it peak to was 86% total processor usage, and most of the time it was way down near 15% (100% would be all 20 cores saturated). I then ran an Image Integration on 10 subs and the most it peaked at was about 18%.
Then I ran a deconvolution, with default settings, and again it only peaked at about 20%.
I recon you're right that the bottleneck is unlikely to be the processor in a modern box and it's much more about really fast read/write speeds (my ssd is pretty old and only does around 300MB/s).
Quote:
Originally Posted by silv
re the fast storage access:
the Thunderbolt 2 interface (Apple) for hard drives (and other periphery) gives an IO throughput of 20Gb/s .
(bit, not Byte)
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Thunderbolt 2 (and 3) is awesome but make sure you check what speed the drive can actually do.
For example we use a lot of the Lacie Thunderbolt2/usb3 rugged drives at work and on the box they quote the same speed for both. Unsurprising as the drive is just a standard 5400 rpm 2.5" which has a max speed of about 120MB/s - well below the potential speed of both Thunderbolt 2 and usb 3. (I keep telling them to save a $100 per drive and get the usb3 only version but no... Thunderbolt 2 is faster!)
Even an average SSD with a read speed of around 500-600MB/s is nowhere near the potential speed of Thunderbolt 2 - though having an external drive at those speeds is pretty awesome
