Just checked an no exclamation marks…
So is your dual xeon machine working fine after the BIOS update?
The project is a large mapping project which I have just completed with 70 flights…used several eBee’s actually!
Yes my machine works great.
70 flights! How big an area? What were the flight parameters?
Area is 42 Sq KM with 75/70 overlap/4 cm GSD.
I guess you can tell I am not in the US!
The area is sand, gravel and rocks. No where nice to land, bouncing cameras, batteries, you name it!
Multi drone operations using the built in collision avoidance and traffic management. If you havent seen that - you will be highly impressed as priority is given to the ebee with less battery, circling out of the way if a collision is detected, separated by height. Once clear, it goes back to its job!
Been using the new Canon GX9 eBee cameras - very impressive results.
Basically i took the Google Earth polygon and split it roughly in to 10 areas. Then just started flying each area. Some areas required higher accuracy so I used eBee RTK for that.
The client will get 10 sets of data which should be manageable from his side.
I actually tried setting up a Microsoft Azure server with 32 cores. Simple enough - yes! BUT get this…you cannot copy files larger than 2GB from your local machine to the azure server directly. So I decided to set up a virtual storage and FTP the compressed image directory (24 GB) to it and then FTP from the Azure server to the storage.
I can’t believe its so difficult to transfer files to a paid for server! Ridiculous!
Then I tried Fast FCP from Veeam which is supposed to get around the the 2GB file limit. Nope - thats also useless.
Back to square 1.
42 Sq KM is 10,378 acres by the way…!
Man I am all about the drone, but why not use a regular aerial company on a project that size?
Project is inside the CTR of a major international airport…
Well it looks like the BIOS update solved the issue! Thanks for the help!
Great to hear it. How long did it take to process the 2500 photos?
Well its been 13 hours so far and its just 40% of generating the ortho, step 15/18 so I reckon another hour max?
Its good to see the dual Xeon working how it should be!
Hi - We are having similar speed issues as Philip Angell with our dual xeon setup. It runs step 1 ok but gets about half way through the step two and hangs up. It never freezes but makes almost no progress. If the project is not too large (~800 photos) I can move it to my Dell XPS 15 i7 laptop and finish it in a fraction of the time. We have have had several PC techs as well as the manufacturer look at the machine. Nothing seems to improve it.
We just tried to run a ~2,000 photo project. Let it run for 3 days on the pt cloud, used up to about 40GB RAM at the most. Got to around 50% an we finally had to cancel it. We moved it over to Trimble software. Trimble Business Center has sped up considerably with improved stability when we moved it to the dual xeon system (used to have regular failures on an i7 system). Pix4D seems to run worse the more powerful the PC… We have run pix4D on a 4.0GHZ AMD set up with 32GB ram as well. The AMD pc will finish a project but the pt cloud takes far longer than on my laptop and loading the pt cloud for the ortho can take a day or so.
Below are system specs. We process from a Samsung SSD 850 PRO 512GB and utilize our NVIDIA Quadro K4200 4GB in processing. The projects we need to run on this PC are from a Trimble UX5 drone with 24mp camera. Every project has ground control. Project size ranges from 800 to 8,000 photos. The only processing options selected are the merged LAS pt cloud and merged GEOTIFF ortho.
ANY suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If we can’t figure this out soon we will have to move on to another software package.
OS Name Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
Version 10.0.10586 Build 10586
Other OS Description Not Available
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name DESKTOP-17P02IN
System Manufacturer Supermicro
System Model SYS-7038A-I
System Type x64-based PC
System SKU 083615D9
Processor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v3 @ 2.40GHz, 2401 Mhz, 8 Core(s), 16 Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date American Megatrends Inc. 2.0, 2/2/2016
SMBIOS Version 3.0
Embedded Controller Version 255.255
BIOS Mode Legacy
BaseBoard Manufacturer Supermicro
BaseBoard Model Not Available
BaseBoard Name Base Board
Platform Role Workstation
Secure Boot State Unsupported
PCR7 Configuration Binding Not Possible
Windows Directory C:\Windows
System Directory C:\Windows\system32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = “10.0.10586.420”
User Name DESKTOP-17P02IN\AeroView Services
Time Zone Central Daylight Time
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 128 GB
Total Physical Memory 126 GB
Available Physical Memory 122 GB
Total Virtual Memory 144 GB
Available Virtual Memory 140 GB
Page File Space 18.0 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys
Hyper-V - VM Monitor Mode Extensions Yes
Hyper-V - Second Level Address Translation Extensions Yes
Hyper-V - Virtualization Enabled in Firmware No
Hyper-V - Data Execution Protection Yes
Try upgrading your BIOS and motherboard chipset drivers. It worked for me. The extended answer is that apparently Intel changed the hyper threading in V3 of the Xeon CPUs.
I was also suggested to disable the hyper threading if upgrading the BIOS still doesn’t solve it. Please report back here with your findings.
Thanks Philip - We are working with the manufacturer to make sure we have the right BIOS and driver. We have toggled hyperthreading on and off on several PC’s. We can’t seem to tell a difference in either Pix4D or Trimble Photogrammetry.
Point cloud generation does take a long time! Suggest keeping the Task Manager open and watching the CPU loading.
My issue was the beginning of step 3, Load Point Cloud.
Seems to be ok now, touch wood.
Turning hyperthreading off didn’t make a difference when I had the problem. Check my previous thread about looking at your system devices under device manager. That might be the tell all sign.
Re-reading you issue - definitely looks like the Xeon processor is not properly supported by your BIOS.
I have an HP Z840 and the last release mentioned Xeon full support - which makes you wonder why they were selling the motherboard in the first place with a Xeon if it was not properly supported…
Heres what I received during last week discussions with P4D:
Normally, we do not have issues with hyper threading.
However, the architecture of the Xeon v3 models is different from previous architectures. We do not know yet, what exactly causes issues of compatibility with Pix4Dmapper, but we know that hyper threading is something that was changed from previous models. Therefore, we suspect that this might be an issue and that is why we suggest to disable it. In addition, we have noticed that disabling it has worked for some users, which is why we continue to suggest it as a possible solution.
Try these four steps:
- Update motherboard BIOS
- Update chipset driver
- Disable hyperthreading
- Update Quadro driver (crucial)
Philip,
I posted the question a while back about the Quadro drive on the forum and have not had any responses. Did they get that issue fixed? Can you run a quadro with the most recent driver?
I have never had any issues with my Quadro K5200 graphics card.
Austin - We don’t have any ! or ? in the device manager.
Philip - We will keep working with the manufacturer to get the right BIOS and chipset drivers and I will make sure hyperthreading is off. We are running the latest Quadro driver. Do you know of a Quadro 4200 driver version that plays will with Pix4D?
Did you see anything like this under your system devices?