Computer for Cyclone

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Zahner
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Computer for Cyclone

Post by Zahner »

All,

I am getting ready to upgrade my computer and was looking for any recommendations on what specs are best for running cyclone to utilize it to its maximum potential.

Thanks
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Re: Computer for Cyclone

Post by James Hall »

Hello Zahner,

Running Cyclone it is best to have a large enough fast hard drive. Keep your C:drive near empty and have your files on a fast external drive.

My current setup is a 500GB M.2 solid state hard drive for my C:and an 6TB Western digital MY book USB 3.1 for my external storage drive. If I were to upgrade I would do a four channel M.2 RAID 0 for my C drive and a USB-C external storage drive. The scan data should be backed up on your network daily from the external storage drive.

Processor Intel (R) Xeon(R) CPU E-3-1245@ 3.50GHz Ram 32GB would like to upgrade to 64GB

I'm not up on the current crop of video cards. Right now I'm running Quadro M620. I've run into Open GL Rendering issues in the past but not with my current setup.

If you look at your system resources wile Cyclone is running you will see that it is almost never you possessor or ram that is the bottle neck.

James,
Last edited by James Hall on Thu Feb 22, 2018 8:48 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Computer for Cyclone

Post by Tookie »

Our workstations are:

Intel Corei7 6800K
128GB Ram
nvidia 1080 graphics card
2TB Solid State Discs
6 x 6TB HDD (In raid 10 so 18TB capacity)

When importing scans the processor is at 100% and with Register 360 one cpu core is used for one scan so the above system imports 6 scans simultaneously. As James mentioned the most time consuming part is writing the files to disc so the faster the disc the better.

Tookie.
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Re: Computer for Cyclone

Post by Jamesrye »

Running Cyclone it is best to have a large enough fast hard drive. Keep your C:drive near empty and have your files on a fast external drive.

I think the C drive should be an SSD as well. I agree that it needs to be quite large, but I think that if you set your temporary files to another drive then you could get away with a smaller C drive (256 GB SSD for example).

James, you mention using an external USB3.1 Drive, which is what I want to use as it's cheaper than buying a fast internal SSD drive and the Cyclone Project is then portable. At the recent Leica HDS day, I asked about this and was told that it wasn't the best thing to do. They recommended internal drives, one of the reasons given was that USB can be interupted. I'm a bit confused about this because it contradicted some advice that I'd had from Leica before, so if anyone knows for sure then I'd appreciate a definitive answer on this point.

Our setup is pretty similar to Tookies, except that we "only" have 64GB RAM.
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Re: Computer for Cyclone

Post by James Hall »

There is some risk management in all things. An interruption to a USB drive is a little more likely. USB cables can be accidentally unplugged. The power to the external drive can be accidentally turned off. The benefits out way the cost. If you setup automatic backups to your server and have your equipment plugged into an uninterruptible power supply then the chances of data loss is minimal. Walking 6 TB of data across an office and copying it to a local drive is a lot faster than Gigabit Ethernet.

I have setup temporary folders on drives other then C: and it worked well.
The main reason I like to have the temporary folder and scan data on a separate drives is it uses a independent I/O BUS, Drive Controller, for each and less fighting the hard drive has to do to get a read / write cycle the better.

The fastest setups will uses separate BUSes for the operating system, Temp folder and data storage.
Example Buses to use: PCI Express 3.0, Serial ATA 3.0 and USB 3.0.
Putting one fast hard drive on each of these BUSes and running your OS, Temp Folder and Data storage on each would separate out the I/0 bottlenecks at the possessor level.
PCI Express 3.0 supports M.2 with four data channels.

My next upgrade will be based on a Raid 0 with four M.2 Cards using a Drive Controller that supports four data channels. This is the fastest configuration I have found at 3.2GB/sec

http://www.legitreviews.com/samsung-sm9 ... nce_161753

James,
Last edited by James Hall on Thu Feb 22, 2018 7:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Computer for Cyclone

Post by Mergen3D »

Samsung 960 evo series m2 ssd is amazing! (Sequential read Max 3,200 MB/sec | Sequential Write Speed Max 1,900 MB/sec)

What about GPU?
Did anyone test it with Radeon Vega 64 or 56 graphic card? Nowadays it's hard to find high-end GPU. ( thanks to cryptocurrency miners)
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Re: Computer for Cyclone

Post by sim.herrod »

i7 7700K CPU with a slight overclock from 4.2 to 4.5GHz
64GB Ram
GTX 1070 GPU
Corsair AIO water cooling
2x 1TB Samsung 960 EVO NVMe m.2
1x 1TB Samsung 850 PRO SATA III

Moving from an 3+ yrs old Xeon cpu/Quadro gpu/HDD setup to this has been a revelation.
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Re: Computer for Cyclone

Post by matu78 »

This the spec that our IT contractor is recommending for me. Any thoughts?


SSD PCIe 1x1024GB M.2 NVMe Highend card 1
Xeon E3-1275v5 3.60GHz 8MB Turbo Boost 1
NVIDIA Quadro P1000 4GB 1
16GB DDR4-2133 2
Lic - Win10 Pro WS <=4 Core 1
DVD SuperMulti SATA 1
Gigabit Ethernet PCIe x1 1
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Re: Computer for Cyclone

Post by James Hall »

This spec is a little light on ram.
32GB to 64GB is what Leica recommends per their literature.

http://hds.leica-geosystems.com/downloa ... _DS_en.pdf
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Re: Computer for Cyclone

Post by matu78 »

Yep thats wahat I thought. I checked with IT and there are 2x 16GB RAM boards
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