You probably know this, but there is an option to let gdalwarp use more cores: -wo NUM_THREADS=ALL_CPUS. It gives some improvement, but not really staggering. Splitting up operations over individual tiles would really fasten up things. Even if I use only one VM, I can define 32 cores, and it would certainly be interesting to experiment with programs like MPI to integrate multiple VMs into one computing cluster.

Jan

On 01/12/2013 02:38 AM, Kennedy, Paul wrote:
Hi,
Yes, we are pretty sure we will see a significant benefit. The processing algorithms are CPU bound not io bound. Our digital terrain model interpolations often run for many hours ( we do them overnight) but the underlying file is only a few gigabytes. If we split them into multiple files of tiles and run each on a dedicated process the whole thing is quicker, but this is messy and results in a stitching error.

Another example is gdalwarp. It takes quite some time with a large data set and would be. A good candidate for parallelisation, as would gdaladdo.

I believe slower cores but more of them in pcs are the future. My pc has 8 but they rarely get used to their potential.

I am certain there are some challenges here, that's why it is interesting;)

Regards
pk

On 11/01/2013, at 6:54 PM, "Even Rouault" <even.roua...@mines-paris.org <mailto:even.roua...@mines-paris.org>> wrote:

Re: [gdal-dev] does gdal support multiple simultaneous writers to raster

Hi,

This is an intersting topic, with many "intersecting" issues to deal with at
different levels.

First, are you confident that in the use cases you imagine that I/O access won't be the limiting factor, in which case serialization of I/O could be acceptable
and this would just require an API with a dataset level mutex.

There are several places where parallel write should be addressed :
- The GDAL core mechanisms that deal with the block cache
- Each GDAL driver where parallel write would be supported. I guess that GDAL
drivers should advertize a specific capability
- The low-level library used by the driver. In the case of GDAL, libtiff

And finally, as Frank underlined, there are intrinsic limitations due to the format itself. For a compressed TIFF, at some point, you have to serialize the
writing of the tile, because you cannot kown in advance the size of the
compressed data, or at least have some coordination of the writers so that a "next offset available" is properly synchronized between them. The compression
itself could be serialized.

I'm not sure however if what Jan mentionned, different process, writing the same
dataset is doable.



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