Thinkbox Releases Sequoia 1.0!

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dhirota
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Re: Thinkbox Releases Sequoia 1.0!

Post by dhirota »

I have nothing to post for the last several weeks, since I attended HXGN LIVE in Anaheim and ESRI UC + Imaging and Mapping Forum in San Diego.

On returning on Friday, I completed my prototype workstation for computing/meshing by adding the backup/storage function using a AVAGO 9361-8i raid SAS controller (12Gb/sec) in raid 6 using 7-Seagate 8TB SAS (12Gb/sec) drives + 240 GB SSD for cache giving me about 40TB of space. This hopefully will give me faster storage I/O than the 6Gb/sec SATA drives at an increased cost for the SAS disk drives.

I have started testing using our Riegl mobile scan point clouds to see what they look like after meshing.
Dennis Hirota, PhD, PE, LPLS
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Re: Thinkbox Releases Sequoia 1.0!

Post by LPaulCook »

Hi Dennis,

Please tell us what you have learned with your new extreme machine. What is making the most improvements and how much improvement and why.

I'm sure your review will be very helpful to many.

Thanks!
L. Paul Cook, PLS
www.LPC3D.com
dhirota
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Re: Thinkbox Releases Sequoia 1.0!

Post by dhirota »

Paul

Unfortunately, I cannot list all the items that I have learned building our prototype workstation for the last several months. The one significant concept that I have learned is that no matter what you have prepared for, technology is moving faster than you think and the infinite details need to answered at a cost greater than you anticipated. When you live in a location a minimum of 2,500 miles from the nearest significant land mass and technology centers, you learn that FEDEX, UPS, Amazon, and Monoprice can make a difference in what you can accomplish when most stores in Hawaii carry 100’s of different sunscreen labels.

I have listed most of the items in this thread that I have used to build the system, but here is an overview:

1. INTEL server 2600CWTR MB, 16 RAM slots, allowing 1TB memory (currently using 256GB RAM, eight-32GB Crucial LRDIMM DDR4-2133), Two 10GbE NIC ports, Two LGA2011-3 (Socket R3) Xeon processor sockets, nine 6Gb/sec. SATA ports, one M.2 connector
2. Two Xeon E5-2637 v4 (15M cache, 3.5-3.7GHz) Processors, 8 cores, 16 threads total, max memory=1,536GB
3. Nvidia EVGA GTX980 Ti video card, 6GB VRAM.
4. AVAGO 9361-8i SAS/SATA 12Gb/sec raid controller
5. seven- 8TB Seagate SAS 12Gb/sec Enterprise disks, in raid6 configuration, 40TB
6. Display 4K 75 inch Samsung TV with 4 HDMI ports
7. Keyboard/mouse using Bluetooth Logitech
8. EVGA gold 850W PS
9. Cooler Master HAF X Full Tower Case with wheels
10. 250 GB SSD Samsung boot/program drive
11. Windows 10

Our previous prototype workstation was built about 18 months ago using an AVAGO raid controller to build an eight 1TB raid 0 SSD system, 8TB total, to handle work space storage. It worked very well for speed, but recent media errors make it totally unreliable. We have been using Samsung 2TB SSD, but we will be using the Samsung 4TB SSD for that soon in a non-raid 0 configuration.

With our scanning projects, we are looking at detail and color image quality as crucial items for our clients. For many on the LSF, these may not matter especially if one is in the commodity market place where you are competing on price.

The APT example that I have used on this thread consists of six Z+F 5010X scans of 40-50M points each. My Dell M6800 laptop has 32GB RAM and 7TB of SSD storage. For me to generate the meshes using Sequoia on it, I could only run two concurrent tasks because of the memory limitation. I could also run many more concurrent sessions using Thinkbox’s DEADLINE and Sequoia’s Hacksaw on the six dual Xeon servers that we have in the office.

The important improvement that I have seen with the above described workstation is the opportunity to run 10 to 20 concurrent tasks using Sequoia with the 16 Xeon threads at 3.7GHz and not having to worry that the workflow will crash because of a memory limit.

Another advantage that we have seen with the 10GbE NIC ports is the ability to copy/move 100GB’s to TB size files very quickly. Our office is 10GbE linked with 10GbE switches and all our servers and workstations that have 10GbE have NIC cards with two 10GbE ports.

I cannot tell you that the seven 8TB Seagate Enterprise SAS 12Gb/sec. HDD are giving faster access thoughput than the 8TB Seagate Enterprise SATA 6Gb/sec. HDD that we also have.

I have no benchmarks to give you, but we are converting all our systems to Windows 10 by the end of the month. It is interesting to watch a copy from a SSD workspace to our new prototype workstation show 300 to 400 MB/sec on W10 and task manager show NIC 2-3 GB/sec. I have not checked to see if these two numbers are related.

We will be using that prototype workstation to work on some new technology projects. This workstation is not as portable as a Macbook or iPAD, but with wheels, I can take it almost anywhere that I can go and give a presentation on what we are doing by plugging it into a TV.
Last edited by dhirota on Mon Jul 18, 2016 6:59 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Thinkbox Releases Sequoia 1.0!

Post by LPaulCook »

Thank you Dennis for giving such a detailed report, it's much appreciated.
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dhirota
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Re: Thinkbox Releases Sequoia 1.0!

Post by dhirota »

Paul

Some additional information with only a vague reference to Sequoia.

We are moving/copying scan folders to the new machine for later processing with Sequoia from other workstations. No benchmarks, but for folks that may not be anticipating doing what we are processing, the numbers that I show here may help you.

We are moving/copying folders 400GB to 600GB with 10K to 20K items in the folders, both raw and processed data. W10 Task Manager on the new computer is displaying 2.5GB/sec. to 3.2GB/sec over the new computer single 10GbE port from two different PC's copying with 10GbE ports at the same time. The raid6, 40TB disk system is writing the data at 300MB/sec. I am sure a raid10 system would be faster, but I have no idea how this compares with other systems out there.
Dennis Hirota, PhD, PE, LPLS
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[email protected]
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LPaulCook
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Re: Thinkbox Releases Sequoia 1.0!

Post by LPaulCook »

Thanks Denis,

You move a lot more data than I do, that's for sure. I have only seen 200mps or so in my V3.0 USB ports to external HDs so it does take some time to move large job files.

I thought I had a nice powerful setup but it is nothing compared to yours.

I'll have to stop in someday and visit your shop.

I like that you are also a family land surveying/ civil engineering business founded by your father or grandfather many years ago. Our family business of land surveying and later civil engineering was started in 1911 in Los Angeles by by grandfather who was also a USC professor of Civil Engineering at the same time.
L. Paul Cook, PLS
www.LPC3D.com
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