High Octane Hardware For GIMP Use?

green pizza asks: "My research group will soon be purchasing several workstations for telescope image analysis. We are currently planning on going with dual Pentium III systems from VA running Redhat 7. We have a good deal of custom filters and scripts that will be churning away in The Gimp and would like the best performance possible. Is our current choice the best one? Should we consider moving up to a Xeon system or perhaps a high-end, multiple processor Sun Blade 1000, SGI Onyx 3000, or Alpha?"

Comments

Re:Thanks

[StandardDeviant]

The gimp is not intended to scale at all on CPU (memory is a differnt story). It's a photoshop clone. So maybe if you had a 64 CPU box you could have 64 gimp instances each working on 64 different data sets.

Video performance in the machine is almost a non-issue from the task you've described. Heavy duty image manipulation is very CPU dependent (speed and cache size), but since you aren't rendering this stuff in real-time 3d, it's just a bunch of numbers on disk. So PDL, numpy, c/c++/fortran with LAPACK/BLAS, matlab, et al. would be better. Put your money in CPU and IO bandwidth (like somebody said, if your data sets are >2gb each you need a 64bit platform like alpha/MIPS/sparc).

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