Thread count and Amdahl's law

[hoxca]

hi there,

I'm so loving PixInsight that i would dedicace a better processing rig to it
We've (for now) no GPU support in pixinsight, so all calculation is done on the CPU side.

Anyway, with AMD threadripper Gen3 CPU, there are now massive core count out there to get the job done.
And i know that there were hard job done by the PI core team to get better multithread support.

But as far as i know Amdahl's law draw some theorical limits in process parallelism return.

So here is my simple questions about a thread count :
Does it make senses to run pixinsight with a 64 ot 128 multithread architecture ? (AMD 3970 or 3990)
Is there any other software bottleneck that will hit us before that thread count ?

[pfile]

it is a good question... unless juan has some ideas, the only way to find out may be empirical. you can instantiate big machines in GCP or AWS and install PI there - i have done it in the distant past - and plot performance vs # cores. it shouldnt cost too much to try, certainly less than buying a whole machine.

rob

[Juan Conejero]

Does it make senses to run pixinsight with a 64 ot 128 multithread architecture ? (AMD 3970 or 3990)

Definitely yes! Many processes in PixInsight implement embarrassingly parallel tasks, which benefit maximally from an increase in the number of available processor cores. Other processes that we have implemented using high-level parallelism also have the potential to run much faster on the new generation of AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors, especially when used in combination with fast NVMe storage devices. Along with this, we are working on new improvements to our multithreading support for the next 1.8.9 and 1.8.10 releases.

Budget permitting, if I were to build a new workstation I'd wait for the 3990WX with Linux and not less than 128 GB of RAM.

[hoxca]

Thank you very much Juan

Your link to the high-level parallelism post is an adapted answer with sharp expertise to my question.

Beside of the CPU cost the whole platform will hurt our wallet mainboard / nvme drive / memory and decent cooling.
So i'm not sure i can afford a 64 Core / 128 HT; but i definitly need to upgrade from my darwin MBP laptop circa 2018
I will get away from this nasty thermal throttling thing; this laptop is far from ideal for a good pixinsight job !
 
And yes, i'm happy to get an excuse to bring Linux @home as i've switched from it to a Darwin Laptop, 9y ago.