Hardware for Image Stitching

[Scheer]

Not sure where I should actually be putting this... but I'd like to know what hardware to go with for stitching several extremely large images together.

 

My brother-in-law recently purchased a UAV that takes pictures of crop fields to help with analysis of the land. A typical field will have hundreds to thousands of pictures that need to be stitched together with software he has (no clue what it is called, will find out tonight), the completed files are 20-50GB in size.

 

He is currently doing it on a 3rd gen i7 laptop, and it takes 8+ hours to complete one image, so he is looking at buying a server to do it on. I'm just not sure what would be the most beneficial. It maxes out all 8 threads of his CPU, but I'm not sure if less cores clocked higher would be better than more cores clocked low. He maxed out 8GB of RAM, but after upgrading to 16GB he hasn't maxed it yet, so it isn't an issue. He also says it is fine running off HDDs, as replacing his SSD with a HDD didn't slow the projects down any. 

 

Tonight we are going to throw the program on my i7-4770k desktop, and also my e5-1620 server to see how much quicker it is on them in comparison, but they are pretty much the same CPU and I don't have any higher end hardware to test it on to see differences.

 

He is willing to spend a good sum of money on it, I just don't want to put a pair of $3000 CPUs into a server and find out it doesn't help...

 

I personally would have though the video card would be doing all the work, but he says (and I'll be verifying tonight) that it doesn't put any load on the GPU at all.

 

No clue if this relates to something some of you guys do to point me in the right direction... figured I would ask anyways.

[Kryptyx]

What program is he using to stitch? I did this a while ago on a 4770k which was okay but the program wasn't anything special. I'd imagine there would be something out there that would utilize a GPU over a CPU.

[Scheer]

What program is he using to stitch? I did this a while ago on a 4770k which was okay but the program wasn't anything special. I'd imagine there would be something out there that would utilize a GPU over a CPU.

 

I found out the program is a skinned version of Pix4d mapper, and does not utilize the GPU at all.

 

Currently running the program on my computer, all 8 threads are pegged with 8GB of RAM used and hopefully it will be done by morning...

 

I did find some info online for hardware, looks like a 4960X is recommended over dual Xeons as even the extremely high end ones don't offer much more performance. One of the quotes in a FAQ was that a $10,000 server didn't perform much better, very few details are given, the software appears to still be beta-ish.

 

I also found some test results between a i7-3930k and a i7-3720QM, and what took the mobile processor 12 hours still took the desktop one 10.5, which seems crazy that it is only barely better. Just seems like the program is horribly optimized.

[i_build_nanosuits]

thats a job for x99 rig if you have money for a good rig id get an i7-5820k that i would overclock along with 24 or 32gb of fast ddr4.

[runit3]

I've used PTgui before, seemed half decent, but I wasn't trying to compile literal fields of images. May be worth a venture to find the licensed version in the shadier portions of the interweb