Desktop computer advice needed - Page 2

pluto (Hugh) · #21 05-09-2016, 07:10 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rally

Not sure where you are looking Hugh?

My first iMac 6 years ago was an i7 and they are still available in various i5 and i7 configurations today.

You build it online and get it how you want from Apple - you can get an i7 in a number of processor options.

I just fiddled online and configured a 4.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 4.2GHz with 32gb RAM, AMD Radeon R9 M395X with 4GB, 1TB flash drive
The big flash drive made it a bit exy, but a standard 3TB hard drive was OK.

The "servers" (traditional box without screen) are called Mac Pro's
The standard processor in them is a 3.5GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 processor but if you have plenty of $$ you can get a 12 core Xeon
They come standard with Dual AMD FirePro D500 with 3GB VRAM graphic cards.
Expensive as a personal PC but powerful and definitely still available !

You dont get the variety of options if you buy the bits and build a WinPC yourself, but you also dont get the potential problems either.

Ah, I was looking on the Apple site and I saw you could customise RAM but didn't see anything about processor, my bad

I use Mac Pros all the time but I wouldn't call them servers, they're a bit pricey for something that lives in a cold room out of sight. They're also significantly more expensive than an equivalent non Mac with the same bits in it, albeit in a much more attractive case.

And my experience doesn't really agree with your idea that you'll have less problems running OSX over Windows. We have far more issues with the Macs at work than the Windows or Linux boxes, and that's in the Mac's native habitat (Design and film production).
I'm typing this on my Mac Book Air 11 on which I'm running Windows 10 and I can say with certainty that it runs so much smoother and more stable in Windows than it did in OSX, plus I don't need to virtualise anything to run the programs I want. Kudos to Apple for writing decent drivers for Windows for their hardware.

However, I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else about what to spend your money on, or your time with, whatever works for you

sil (Steve) · #22 08-09-2016, 12:17 PM

Are there any astro programs for mac that are awesomly better than on windows or linux? I recent inherited a mac mini and wondering what to do with it, if anything. Think its 2.0 i7 with 2GB RAM and 320GB storage. don't want to turn it into a digital photoframe, I dont use the ones I have as it is. Was thinking finding a touch screen and making it a stand alone mandelbrot explorer kiosk.

pluto (Hugh) · #23 08-09-2016, 02:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sil

Are there any astro programs for mac that are awesomly better than on windows or linux? I recent inherited a mac mini and wondering what to do with it, if anything. Think its 2.0 i7 with 2GB RAM and 320GB storage. don't want to turn it into a digital photoframe, I dont use the ones I have as it is. Was thinking finding a touch screen and making it a stand alone mandelbrot explorer kiosk.

You can run PixInsight, it's awesome on every OS

To answer your question though, I'm not aware of any astro related application that is OSX only, and which is better than an alternative available also on other OSs.

Camelopardalis (Dunk) · #24 08-09-2016, 03:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pluto

Ah, I was looking on the Apple site and I saw you could customise RAM but didn't see anything about processor, my bad

...
And my experience doesn't really agree with your idea that you'll have less problems running OSX over Windows. We have far more issues with the Macs at work than the Windows or Linux boxes, and that's in the Mac's native habitat (Design and film production).

Oh I love sweeping comments such as that, especially from one who's just demonstrated they can't use an internet browser properly

In MY experience of working in multi-platform environments for more years than I care to remember, each platform has their own foibles that need to be accommodated if they're expected to play nice with others. Two experiences, different outcomes...take your pick

Camelopardalis (Dunk) · #25 08-09-2016, 03:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sil

Are there any astro programs for mac that are awesomly better than on windows or linux? I recent inherited a mac mini and wondering what to do with it, if anything. Think its 2.0 i7 with 2GB RAM and 320GB storage. don't want to turn it into a digital photoframe, I dont use the ones I have as it is. Was thinking finding a touch screen and making it a stand alone mandelbrot explorer kiosk.

Nothing better or worse than the other options. EQMac does the same as EQmod. Stellarium, PHD, PixInsight are firm favourites on any platform. You can use Wine to run Windows programs, and most Linux programs distribute the source code that you can compile on a Mac. It's a middle ground, but nothing sticks out for astro

pluto (Hugh) · #26 08-09-2016, 04:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Camelopardalis

Oh I love sweeping comments such as that, especially from one who's just demonstrated they can't use an internet browser properly

Yeah I never quite worked out these new fandangled browser thingies

Quote:

Originally Posted by Camelopardalis

In MY experience of working in multi-platform environments for more years than I care to remember, each platform has their own foibles that need to be accommodated if they're expected to play nice with others. Two experiences, different outcomes...take your pick

I totally agree with this. That's kind of the point I was trying to make (perhaps poorly) - in my opinion there's no perfect system and statements to the effect of "run a Mac, you won't have any problems like Windows computers have"* are inaccurate.

*I'm paraphrasing of course

Camelopardalis (Dunk) · #27 08-09-2016, 10:33 PM

Completely agree, there is no perfect system, it's more just a case of "whatever works" IMO to get folk to look past the technology and get on with their work/processing/artistry

g__day (Matthew) · #28 08-09-2016, 11:04 PM

If you want real speed - confirm whether your processing software can either use multiple cores or Direct Compute.

If the answer to multiple cores is yes - well the 10 core I7-6950X isn't cheap but will be unbeatable. I would go 64 GB of RAM and add two of the latest PCI Express SSDs - costly but with 3GB/sec throughput vs 500 MB/sec of a SATA3 SSD - that is six times the speed.

If your software can use Direct Compute - well a uber powerful NVidia GTX 1080 gaming video card makes huge sense - having 2,560 processing cores will lift your imaging processing beyond belief (I have seen video of 4 GPU monsters doing real time x-ray tomography - using specialised software to handling the 10 TB/sec processing load across the 10,000 ALU cores).

I would expect most image processing software doesn't yet take significant advantage of the huge parallelism inherent in modern 3d accelerators - writting decent shader programs still isn't all that simple - give it 3 - 5 years.

I would add get a great - high quality power supply, case and motherboard - and the 30" Kogan monitor is a decent thing to initially pair it with!

You could probably build or buy a rig that for $2K - $3K could do most of what you want - but you could double or triple this spend easily depending on how much headroom you need in your processing capacity, how important your time is to you, your budget and where you need to spend $ to get real world returns.

Camelopardalis (Dunk) · #29 08-09-2016, 11:41 PM

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.

I reckon certain modules would be a good case for it, it's largely SIMD after all...

silv (Annette) · #30 09-09-2016, 12:50 AM

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)

PCIe goes up to 16Gb/s and USB 3.0 and SATA are way below that.

but... that access speed is not necessary for still image processing.
The software pulls the whole images into its workflow before processing anything (that's a guess, I didn't code them, but it sounds logical).
So accessible CPU and RAM, accessible for software and OS, are far more important for this task.
20Gb/s is good for video and music editing.

yeah, go into a good shop and describe what you need it for, like Sil suggested.

Windston (Dan) · #31 10-09-2016, 03:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by g__day

If you want real speed - confirm whether your processing software can either use multiple cores or Direct Compute.

If the answer to multiple cores is yes - well the 10 core I7-6950X isn't cheap but will be unbeatable. I would go 64 GB of RAM and add two of the latest PCI Express SSDs - costly but with 3GB/sec throughput vs 500 MB/sec of a SATA3 SSD - that is six times the speed.

If your software can use Direct Compute - well a uber powerful NVidia GTX 1080 gaming video card makes huge sense - having 2,560 processing cores will lift your imaging processing beyond belief (I have seen video of 4 GPU monsters doing real time x-ray tomography - using specialised software to handling the 10 TB/sec processing load across the 10,000 ALU cores).

I would expect most image processing software doesn't yet take significant advantage of the huge parallelism inherent in modern 3d accelerators - writting decent shader programs still isn't all that simple - give it 3 - 5 years.

I would add get a great - high quality power supply, case and motherboard - and the 30" Kogan monitor is a decent thing to initially pair it with!

You could probably build or buy a rig that for $2K - $3K could do most of what you want - but you could double or triple this spend easily depending on how much headroom you need in your processing capacity, how important your time is to you, your budget and where you need to spend $ to get real world returns.

A PC of that caliper is way overkill for astrophotography software!

Anything over 32GB RAM and I dont think it will be used, and most software wont even make use of the 10 cores, however that is a nice CPU, and if it was to be a purely AP processing system, and not used for 'gaming', then a 1080 would be a waste, better just to get either a good CPU or good GPU, and I would put money on the CPU every day of the week. Also I think the 2,560 processors is CUDA cores or Stream predecessors, and not individual cores like a CPU, and are often not much faster than CPU based rendering in the limited software that it supports. And as for the PCI SSD's, sure, they are quick, but SATA3 is already very very fast, M.2 even more so, which would be a more suitable option, cheaper as well, a 500gb M.2 SSD with a few 2-4TB HDD's in the rig would work really nicely. I dont store any of my AP RAW data on SSD's as the space is simply to expensive for such little gain in processing, HDD's dont bottleneck the processing of the image at all. (I mean, it makes it only very very slightly slower, an SSD in this application is nothing to write home about.)

I have a i7 4770k currently not overclocked, but for certain pieces of software like Star Tools, I have noticed a huge difference from the i5 4590. 4-> 8 cores. That being said, I only have 8GB of ram at the moment and it just sucks, I had 24Gb recently, and it was awesome for memory hungry software, but I had to take it out!

But it really depends on his budget, but an expensive system isnt always a better one. Price to performance on a graph is not linear. Spending 300$ will just get you a crappy pc, $800-$1200 in my experience is the best bang for your buck, anything over $2k, I rarely find people with reasons to justify spending over double for a minor performance upgrade. I have built PC's for kids for $500 that can run games like battlefield on high, and $2.5k just to get to ultra!

With websites like OCAU (An ozzy Pc forum) and their for sale classifieds, it is possible to build a really powerful PC used, from gear that is only about 1-2 years old for a fraction of the price. I have built 4 PC's in the last 6 months this way and have only once had a semi faulty product, which was refunded immediately. I find 40% cheaper is average. However you do need to be a member of the forum for 90 days in order to gain access.

Cheers
Dan

pluto (Hugh) · #32 10-09-2016, 02:43 PM

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.

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)

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

sil (Steve) · #33 12-09-2016, 07:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Camelopardalis

Nothing better or worse than the other options. EQMac does the same as EQmod. Stellarium, PHD, PixInsight are firm favourites on any platform. You can use Wine to run Windows programs, and most Linux programs distribute the source code that you can compile on a Mac. It's a middle ground, but nothing sticks out for astro

Pretty much what I expected, thanks. Never been a Mac person so was hoping there was something niche I haven't heard of. Mac mini is packed away in a box for now

silv (Annette) · #34 12-09-2016, 06:53 PM

pity. can't you think of a local charity/preschool to donate it to? MacMini, probably 2011 model?, is such a reliable little machine and with those specs still good with OSX 10.11 (free OS upgrades) and as an office workstation. it would be sad to just let it collect dust.

g__day (Matthew) · #35 12-09-2016, 08:41 PM

The take away from my earlier post should be a really top quality motherboard and Power Supply is always a great investment; the rest of the gear should be selected to meet your needs.

However realise that coding queue based, multi-threaded software isn't all that hard once you understand the basics (my thesis in the early 80s was on coding frameworks for parallelism and language design...) - so 35 years on hopefully this practice will one day catch on once all the frameworks are set up so even semi skilled idiots can do it

... So maybe in a few years it will be really, really common - as multi cored machine parallelism isn't going away.

To really leverage GPUs you need problems that 1) don't need masive amounts of data transferred to a dedicated hardware unit for just a short period of time and 2) benefit from mass parallelism by being able to be broken down easily into a set of much smaller, individual problems to solve.

DirectCompute (Or OpenCL) is taking off slowly - as the frameworks do exist but are a lot harder to get the hang of. Once this is done - mass parallelism is in everyones hands. You are correct that a CUDA or STEAM core isn't as generally powerful as a RISC core - but its access to shared, high speed memory and ability to do specific transforms really fast, in a massively parallel way is stunning once it kicks in. If our astronomy programs were translated to shift load across a modern CPU / GPU platform - you would simply have sub-second responses for all operations - one day maybe.

One day a bright Uni student may come across a simple way to re-program on the fly from procedural languages to GPU languages - then over night your programs could be re-compiled to run on this hardware (not optimally maybe - that's harder) but it would run a lot faster. I saw this in the late 90s when one student wrote a translater from Fortran to C and recompiled Cayley (a 10,000 page Fortran program designed to do "infinite" precision maths on groups of over 10 ^ 60 elements - think ~ number of atoms in the visible universe - and got it all working over one weekend). Imagine if someone did that for general compute algorithms - game changer... (http://research.ijcaonline.org/volum...pxc3892109.pdf or http://au.mathworks.com/company/news...mathworks.com#) - one day!

sil (Steve) · #36 13-09-2016, 07:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by silv

pity. can't you think of a local charity/preschool to donate it to? MacMini, probably 2011 model?, is such a reliable little machine and with those specs still good with OSX 10.11 (free OS upgrades) and as an office workstation. it would be sad to just let it collect dust.

There are none, as a partially disabled person I am painfully aware of such organisations and their actual benefits, around here unfortunately little and none would pick up donations. I do give my excess gear to families who can actually use them. The mac has no monitor an needs an adapter to connect to normal displays which I havent sorted out yet. It is a shame, its a cute machine but yeah its oldish and I dont know how it runs. So until I am able to sort it out it stays out of my way, its not going to the dump unless its burnt out and it all looked good when i popped the cover.

(sorry for going off topic guys)

Camelopardalis (Dunk) · #37 14-09-2016, 06:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sil

Pretty much what I expected, thanks. Never been a Mac person so was hoping there was something niche I haven't heard of. Mac mini is packed away in a box for now

And I guess I'm pointing out the obvious here but modern versions of Linux and Windows should install and run natively on it

sil (Steve) · #38 15-09-2016, 08:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Camelopardalis

And I guess I'm pointing out the obvious here but modern versions of Linux and Windows should install and run natively on it

Yeah but already have a ton of linux and windows boxes, never used Mac and have no need or interest for yet another computer. Would like to have my Amiga and SGI machines set up but got no room as it is. If it was a macbook though I would but it isn't and theres nothing tempting my interest.

Camelopardalis (Dunk) · #39 15-09-2016, 12:21 PM

Well, like I said originally, there's _different_ software on the Mac for astro, just not necessarily better or worse..

Amiga and SGI...now there's a nerd after me own heart

I used to have a bunch of both of those until I was forced to thin the heard when moving here

the reality is neither have the horsepower to run a web browser properly these days, and the fruit pies and NUCs and so on have more than enough geekery packed into a tiny box these days to make them great for astro.

gregbradley · #40 15-09-2016, 09:36 PM

I ended up with an i7 4ghz 64gb ram 480gb ssd where pgms are stored and 4 TB Hard disk and a Nviida 2gb video card.

Wins 10 now takes about 20-25 secs to boot up compared to 4 -5 minutes and 20 x 32mb images load easily and run like 4 would have before.

Photoshop takes about 10 secs to load instead of 2 minutes.

Its good as I have a backlog of image data to process that was taking too long before. Now its more confrontable. My newer camera a FLI Microline 16200 has nearly 32mb files and so does the 16803 so large files
seem to be a thing of the future and there is no getting away from that.

Greg.