More on Consolidated Mosaic

Well, it has become well known by now that MosaicPro will be included as a native part of IMAGINE Advantage and LPS Core in ERDAS IMAGINE 2010, due Fall 2009. The new MosaicPro had an internal working name of Consolidated Mosaic. MosaicTool, MosaicPro, lessons from ER Mapper and more were used to create the new MosaicPro (http://field-guide.blogspot.com/2009/06/consolidated-mosaic.html). Moreover, we have optimized MosaicPro to be much more RAM and CPU scalable, and that it touches each pixel the fewest times possible.

Yet, let me yell this from the house top.... all ERDAS IMAGINE and LPS customers with current Software Maintenance (SWM) will be receiving this 'new' MosaicPro in version 2010. It is a real gem. You will be impressed.

Here are some early tests:
Dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 4GB RAM, standard disks, Vista Business

Load 3840 images:
9.3.2 16:40 minutes; 463 MB RAM
2010 3:05 minutes; 98 MB RAM

Load 4896 images:
9.3.2 35:06 minutes; 669 MB RAM
2010 4:16 minutes; 113 MB RAM

Cutline Generation on 4896 images:
9.3.2 45:47 minutes; 1,606 MB RAM
2010 01:41 minutes; 125 MB RAM

Mosaicking 127 images:
9.3.2 41:41 minutes
2010 29:11 minutes

Dual Quad-core 2.328 GHz CPU, 16GB RAM, average speed disk array, XP-64
Mosaicking 3982 images:
9.3.2 Not possible
2010 >700GB output file in under 2.5 days

Mosaicking 1147 images:
9.3.2 Not possible
2010 >2.6TB output file in under 5.5 days

All processes used a maximum of just over 800MB of RAM. We researched using more RAM with MosaicPro and found it does not help. This is because we have tuned it so thoroughly that the bottleneck is now the operating system’s thread handling, and hard disk I/O. So, it is time to test fast disks.

But, when using the new added ECW / JPEG2000 direct-write from MosaicPro, MosaicPro will need more RAM. We are working on that as well. We expect we can protect the speed while shrinking down the memory requirement significantly. We expect this will occur in version 2010.1 (Sprilg 2010) or version 2011 (Fall 2010).

Now, we are ready to take MosaicPro to 64-bit. As you can see, when ERDAS goes to 64-bit, we will really take advantage of what 64-bit can really do. Many companies have used a 64-bit port to mask their sloppy coding by accessing more RAM. Not at ERDAS! We know there are a lot of issues surrounding true speed improvement and large file handling. We want our loyal customers to have it all! (http://field-guide.blogspot.com/2009/02/benefits-of-64-bit-architecture-in.html)

Personally, I enjoy looking at ERDAS IMAGINE as a CPU race-car entry. Maybe we can get Intel to test MosaicPro as it does ECW in its performance testing matrix?