SH2--119, NGC7000, IC5070 and Deneb

Mike

Wow - very nice!  What spec PC do you have (want to know if I need to leave mine running for a few days ;-)

Regards

Mark

Hi Mike, 

What a splendid image with so much vibrance to it. I realise why by the amount of integration time you have, and no weak areas there either. Well done for your perseverance. I'm not sure I'd have the patience to process such a vast amount of data. We'd better hope that within the next few years petabyte drives become available along with some pretty fast transfer rates!

With the heat here  at the moment I'd be afraid my laptop would expire from heat exhaustion tackling all that data, along with yours truly if it gets much hotter.

Regards, 
Ray 

Hi Mark,

I used an Intel 7-2600K quad-core processor @ 3,5GHz computer with 16GB of RAM.
The computer is from 2011 !!
But I need a new computer.
I'm considering to buy an AMD Threadripper 3970x 32 core processor with 128GB of RAM.

Ray and Mark thank you for the compliments and enjoy the nightsky of Fregenal de la Sierra.

Mike van den Berg

Great image Mike! I hope you will manage to keep producing them and get a new PC. Simon

Mike

Will be interesting to see the difference.  My computer is 3 years old now, a Scan Computers 3xs gaming machine (not used for much gaming...) - Intel Core i7  6800k 6 core 12 threads 3.5ghz overclocked, 256gb M.2 system disk and 32gb (4 x 8gb cards) DDR4 2000 Vengence memory, dual 8gb Asus Strix 1070 display cards, 2th  seagate spinning drive.

Initially I found the disks  to be the major bottleneck.  I bought a couple of medium sided SSDs to split the paging/swap files on, later bought 4 x 1tb ssds and created a single stripe for my astro processing data.  That made a very fast machine, but with CMOS cameras and 100+ images, memory seems to have become a bottleneck again, so I think I will upgrade to 64gb memory- I think that is the max my machine will take although I'll check with Scan.

I'll have a go at processing this too and see how long my machine takes if the data is available.


[Edit: Just found out my machine can handle up to 128gb memory - pondering if that is worth while investment in a 3 year old machine...]

Regards

Mark


Mark

By new and get 10+ core Xeon, or one of these new AMD thread thingies


3 years old in PC language is like us a dinosaur

Steve

Ha - I thought I was the dinosaur - now I know it is not me but my PC!  LOL

Well - results in.

2 hours 15 minutes for mine to do entire batch pre processing in PixInsight.  To my surprise, the results are that my PC was CPU bound for 80% of the time, then switching to memory bound for the last approx 20% where the stacking/integration occurred.   No point in buying more memory for this machine to improve the 20% hit!

Looks like you are right Mike - new CPU is the key and AMD have the better CPU package at the moment in terms of work through put.  

Question is for me - rather than invest in a new PC (which is perfect for my work and other use), why not buy a server and max it out with cheap server RAM, large SSD farm and the largest number of CPU cores you can get (dual physical hexacore CPUs for example)?  I know someone who did that and seems to bet great results - set it going on the server and come back to it later leaving the PC for other things...

Attached are the periodic screen shots I took of the CPU/Memory load.  Disk 7 is my 4 x 1TB ssd stripe used for astro processing - hardly broke a sweat

Regards

Mark