Pointcloud processing workstation

[MKR_]

Hi

 

I'm a 26y old Belgian BIM-engineer at a contractor and work with big pointclouds (car/metro tunnels). For reference: current project: 160+GB, 7+billion points with all scans combined. My collegue surveyor is using a Leica RTC360 scanner and uses Cyclone Register to process the data. I'm using Cyclone 3DR to make meshes of the clouds. Processing these files takes a lot of time, linking and working with these kind of clouds in Autocad/Revit is slow and laggy and trying to reduce the cloud to have less points is a RAM hungry process. Reducing pointclouds on my own workstation consumes all the recources so I can't realy do anything else than stare at my screen...for hours..and that's not so productive I guess... Our (me and surveyor) idea: convice our company to buy a powerhorse workstation ("supercomputer") that can be accessed remotely by him, me and maybe other departments aswell (e.g. graphical department that does rendering).

I've found a nice article on this topic https://aecmag.com/workstations/workstations-for-point-cloud-processing-leica-cyclone/, based on that I've come up with the following specs.

 

Budget: not important: best we can get but value/price in mind.

 

Option 1: "ideal, part availability ignored"

RAM G.skill Ripjaws V 128GB (4x32) DDR4-3600MHz CL18
The more RAM, the more CPU threads Cyclone will use.

CPU R9 5950X (16C @ 4.9GHz boost)

In the article they talk about i9-10900k having the best single core performance but they didn't include any of the AMD's R9 5000 series and instead compared it to threadrippers. Knowing that a lot of CAD software still utilises single or few cores but rendering uses many I was wondering what a good middleground would be. So I've went over some geekbench 5 scores: R9 5000X series, TR3000 (X/WX) series, lastest Epyc series VS 10th gen i9 and a handfull of Xeon W & E series. Surprisingly I found out my poor Xeon E5-1630v3 in my own workstation is worse than my i7-4790k in my personal desktop at home, which I wanted to replace by one of those non existing Ryzen 9 CPU's. Another conclusion: R5950X looks a good allrounder to me, having the highest single core performance and very decent multi-core scores.

Storage 2TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD + a few TB 7200RPM HDD Seagate Barracuda

Is it better to have a PCIe SSD aswell or maybe a 2nd M.2 to split write and read tasks on 2 drives and thus benefit from their full write/read bandwith (I've read that somewhere)?

GPU Nvidia Quadro RTX4000 8GB or higher?

Processing pointclouds isn't really GPU heavy, nor is CAD 3D modelling but my collegues that do rendering might like a decent card...? Since the workstation would be multi-purpose I would go with as high as my company is willing to pay for this.

My own workstation has a Quadro K4200 which is not a bottleneck for pointcloud processes.

MB ASRock X570 CREATOR ATX

10Gbit/s network would be realy nice to transfer large pointclouds from/to the server. Process files locally first and once done copy to the server. Is it better value if you buy a MB with a 10Gbit port or one without and add one via a PCIe card?

CPU-Cooler Noctua NH-U12A

PSU Seasonic PRIME TX 1000W 80+ Titanium

Overkill or headroom, whatever you prefer.

Case Fractal Design Define R5

Are there still simplistic designs with preferably good airflow and without tempered glass these days? Or maybe a rack mounted case if the workstation would be located in the server room? Any good options here?

 

On the sharing-is-caring subject: would this kind of central workstation be powered on permanently or do I need special hardware to power this system on remotely (a motherbord with an SOC on it?)?

 

Any improvements/ideas?

 

Option 2: "best we can get right now"

<insert some intel build here I guess>

Any ideas?

 

Thank you for reading all this, I tried to keep it short but I failed. Thanks in advance for the help!

 

[Radium_Angel]

4 minutes ago, MKR_ said:

Thank you for reading all this, I tried to keep it short but I failed. Thanks in advance for the help!

Would carrying the system on site (do you do anything on site?) and allow it to do rendering while you are working, be of any help? In which case May I suggest a Lunchbox PC?

https://www.theportablepc.com/

 

[MKR_]

I don't do anything on site, apart from some visits every now and then. But my collegue surveyor processes them on site on a laptop (a decent one but a build for purpose workstation would be better) and then transfers them either over the slow internet (eliminating this would be nice aswell) or he sends someone with a HDD to the office. The PC doesn't have to be on site. It could be located in the server room and then accessed with remote desktop. Similar to homeworking now due to covid: I'm taking over my own workstation at the office with a crappy pc from home.

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to New Builds and Planning

***

 

Rarely I get to say this and really mean it, but I really, really do feel you with 3DR and big point clouds. My engineering BA (land surveyor) has project with 90 million points on bigger cloud. The main project file is 8gigs, and I had to make smaller versions of it to make save times faster. The hours of waiting too. I spent probably 1-1.5h yesterday waiting for meshing to complete.

 

As for system, I can't really provide insight. I only know that i5 with 8gigs of RAM I'm limited to on school PCs is much worse than my own 4770K and 16gigs of RAM I got to work with year ago using 2018 version of 3DReshaper. I feel like going with Threadripper might be better way. Like if Leica does improve on optimization, I would think its more likely they think about using rendering servers and therefore more cores over higher clockspeeds.

 

Really can't offer any other insight. This BA is only thing I have (and probably will do) with laser scanning tech, with GIS being my specialization.