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Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's [message #15721 is a reply to message #15635]

Fri, 04 June 1999 00:00

Peter Mason
Messages: 145
Registered: June 1996

Senior Member

"Tanya Lancaster" <lancaste@morph.ebme.cwru.edu> wrote:
> We are looking into purchasing a dual processor pc. I was wondering
> if there would be a notable increase in speed for running IDL
> programs.
> Right now we handle large medical image data sets and operations on
> the data sets take up to several hours on a PII -400, 256 mb memory.

We have a dual PII/300 running WinNT4. As has been noted by other
posters, the whole IDL environment is single-threaded and as such will
not run on more than 1 CPU at a time. However, the second CPU does
provide a varying amount of benefit - operating-system calls (such as
I/O) can involve it. At times you can see an overall CPU usage of up
to 70% or so while doing flat-out processing in ENVI, although this is
unusual and the typical figure is of course 50%.
Unless you are going to be writing multithreaded routines for accessing
via IDL's call_external (or similar), or doing some sort of concurrent
work like the Linux poster, I'd say that dual CPU is something of a
luxury and the money's better spent on more memory or hardware RAID.
(If you're routinely crunching through large datasets then it is likely
that a good I/O subsystem will be your best investment by **F*A*R**.)

Peter Mason

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[Message index]

		IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: Tanya Lancaster on Thu, 03 June 1999 00:00
		Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: mgs on Mon, 07 June 1999 00:00
		Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: woodford on Mon, 07 June 1999 00:00
		Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: Laurent Chardon on Fri, 04 June 1999 00:00
		Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: steinhh on Fri, 04 June 1999 00:00
		Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: rivers on Fri, 04 June 1999 00:00
		Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: steinhh on Fri, 04 June 1999 00:00
		Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: rivers on Fri, 04 June 1999 00:00
		Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: Peter Mason on Fri, 04 June 1999 00:00
		Re: IDL and Dual Processor PC's By: David Foster on Thu, 10 June 1999 00:00

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