Does Scene take advantage of advanced CPU instructions?

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SAttaya
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Does Scene take advantage of advanced CPU instructions?

Post by SAttaya »

Specifically, Intel's SSE4.2, AVX, AVX2 (someone got 4 x Intel E5-2680v3 in a box
and those processors have AVX2, I'm pretty sure).
(Please excuse my ignorance, I don't know what the corresponding AMD instruction extensions are.)

I'm not even going to expect FARO to use the processors in the GPU on the video card.

Are there libraries SCENE calls that recognize the feature sets the CPU's have, or
does FARO just code for the lowest common denominator?

Hopefully I'll get an answer from a FARO developer, but who knows, may some of you code guys
out there have experience with this.
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TommyMaddox
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Re: Does Scene take advantage of advanced CPU instructions?

Post by TommyMaddox »

I am not a FARO developer, but I had many long conversations with their high level dev team regarding a similar topic.

They also have no CUDA support, which is similar to just about everybody else in the industry, meaning that the power of that older Quadro-6000 isn't being touched really.

I typically run SCENE on a workstation with the following specs:

Windows 7 x64 bit
Dual Opteron 6272 16 core processors, 2.1 GHz
128 Gb of DDR3-1600 ECC RAM
NVIDIA Quadro 6000 GPU
2x 128 Gb SSDs in RAID-0 (onboard RAID controller)
2x 240 Gb SSDs in RAID-0 (onboard RAID controller)
5x 2TB HDDs in RAID-5 (ASUS dedicated RAID card)
ASUS KGPE-D16 board

When pre-processing scans, and doing registration work (particularly generating point clouds) it runs extremely slow and takes many many hours to complete steps, however the resource monitor/task manager shows SCENE as using upwards of 80GB of RAM and pegging all 32 cores to 100% usage, which causes the workstation to be useless for performing any other tasks.

After several discussions over a few months, they found that SCENE does not utilize dual physical processors (even though it appeared to), and really only uses 4 physical cores, where high clock speeds are the primary beneficial factor.

They also mentioned that I was the only person they knew of who ran SCENE on Opterons, so no development or testing time was dedicated to ensuring optimization/compatibility with that CPU family.

As such, they highly recommended running the I7 platforms, with Xeon platforms holding a second place.

So for the machine I built next, I got a 3.5 GHz Xeon 4 core, with 32GB of DDR4-2133 ECC, and it hauls ass, despite costing less than $1k. Plus it has 8 slots on the motherboard, and came with 2 16gb sticks, allowing for fairly substantial expansions.
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Re: Does Scene take advantage of advanced CPU instructions?

Post by SAttaya »

After several discussions over a few months, they found that SCENE does not utilize dual physical processors (even though it appeared to), and really only uses 4 physical cores, where high clock speeds are the primary beneficial factor.
Re the above statement and SCENE 6.2:
* does SCENE 6.2 only use 4 physical (not hyper-threaded/shared) cores if you have only one processor with > 4 cores, some of the Xeon's are 6-22 physical cores per processor and you can put two (2) processors in a system giving you 12-44 physical cores, even with out the max 30%+ you'd get from hyper-threading?
* does SCENE 6.2 really make both processors (with there 2-22 physical cores each) completed loaded when it is doing the above.

Or do some of these statements only apply to AMD processors?

BTW, the 6.2 manual says "recommended specification" for processor is
"Quad-core x64
Intel Core i7/Xeon, 8 physical
cores
",
although I do have to admit that I'm a little confused in reconciling
"quad-core x64 Intel Core i7/ Xeon, 8 physical cores"
unless it means for i7's quad-core and for xeon's 8 physical cores?
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