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dual processors (Read 1071 times)

fabs YaBB Newbies Offline Posts: 1	dual processors Jun 17^th, 2005, 6:29pm hi there I´m working on a real time motion tracking project. i´m using p90. My question is: does Processing support dual processors. I am going to put a new pc together wich should have as much performance as possible. Is there any tricks to speed up performance in general. thanx in advance fabs

beachmeat Full Member Offline Posts: 105	Re: dual processors Reply #1 - Oct 13^th, 2005, 4:13pm No it doesnt as far as I know. Hyperthreading, which is pretending to be 2 CPUs, has the effect that you can just use 50% of the CPU (you can turn that off in the Bios though). I expect the same from Dual PCs since Processsing runs in a single thread.
	*home sweet home*

cello

Re: dual processors
Reply #2 - Oct 13^th, 2005, 6:48pm

The short answer: yes, but not without some work. Java supports multiple threads (and thus multiple processors), however, the structure of Processing is purely single-threaded (you wouldn't want two different threads drawing to the same screen at the same time without careful coordination).

In the case of a motion tracking project, you could run multiple threads for image analysis (i.e. send frame 1 to thread 1, frame 2 to thread 2, frame 3 to thread 1, etc.), but this would require a bit of coordination and design on your part (it's no magic bullet). If you are unfamiliar with threads, read the Java tutorial on Threads, but don't expect to be able to get things working on Processing without some serious practice.

Marcello

beachmeat

Re: dual processors
Reply #3 - Oct 14^th, 2005, 9:46am

Threads in P were for me a too big hassle to be considered Cheesy

But then on the other hand, I am just a n00b.
Speaking of motiontracking, I assume you would not do that in Processing, but in a program thats more ready to do that? I can recommend you EyesWeb, for pure motiontracking you will have that set up in a day with communication to Processing. This could then run on a dual machine...I assume.

home sweet home

mkn

Re: dual processors
Reply #4 - Nov 13^th, 2005, 4:17pm

Cello: Or have just one free running thread on one CPU to do all the motion tracking into buffers and let the processing thread run on the other CPU and do all drawing to screen from the buffers as fast as it can. This way you'd be able to tweak the hyperthreading balance according to the thread loads and hopefully get a steady output framerate, which is what you usually want if you do real time stuff. And also you dont have to get into a complicated thread handler that makes sure to properly balance the threads so that not one CPU gets too much load and thereby resulting in unstable choppy output.

cello

Re: dual processors
Reply #5 - Nov 13^th, 2005, 8:02pm

That would work, although I'm guessing any kind of advanced motion tracking will take a considerably higher amount of CPU than drawing to the screen, and you probably want the motion tracking and drawing to be in sync (you might not want the screen to update more than once for each motion track update), in which case the gain will be much smaller than dividing up the motion tracking work.

Also, you don't need a complicated thread handler so much (after all, Java has a rather streamlined and easy to use thread system), you just need to think in parallel and approach the problem as simultaneous processes.

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