0001073: would like to donate some processors - MantisBT

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0001073	ardour	features	public	2005-09-09 22:19	2008-11-20 23:52

Reporter	mtaht	Assigned To	taybin
Priority	normal	Severity	minor	Reproducibility	always
Status	closed	Resolution	no change required

Summary	0001073: would like to donate some processors
Description	I have 6 old 800 series 1.6 Ghz opteron processors (system pulls) that I would love to have find a home with someone doing work on making ardour/jack/ladspa scale better on multiprocessors (and behave well under NUMA). Ideally 4 of these would go into a quad board, but I'm told that 800s can go into dual processor machines as well. This latter is a tough call - a dual core motherboard and processor would cost about the same a dual opteron motherboard and free processors... In particular I'd like to see the export/mixdown functions get parallelized. I'm always eager for that final mix and going from 96khz/24 bit to 44100/16 takes too long (I know that's a subjective thing! :)) Many thanks for ardour, I just finished chucking XP out of my studio completely.
Tags	No tags attached.

paul 2005-09-10 17:09 administrator ~0002322	this is a very nice offer. two problems: 1) you cannot parallelize export, since we use JACK to allow the inclusion of other JACK clients as part of a session. JACK does not run in parallel at present, and even if you were to use jackdmp (the mp stands for "multiprocessor") it will not do what you want, since separate JACK clients get parallelized, not a single client. 2) ardour was developed on multiprocessor systems from the start, but it has always been my assumption that if you had a dual processor system, you would use 1 processor for audio/DSP, and the other for GUI plus "other" stuff (disk i/o etc). the architecture is designed with the idea that you might parallelize internal processing within ardour, but that will be a difficult task that probably only 1 or 2 people know enough to do (me being one of them). 3) i already have a dual AMD opteron system :) Let me know if you have any comments or further ideas.

mtaht 2005-09-10 17:44 developer ~0002323 Last edited: 2005-09-10 18:50	re: 1) I didn't know about jackdmp, I just read about it via google. A good start on another part of the problem! The site where it's supposed to be at - http://www.grame.fr/~letz/jackdmp.zip doesn't have it, however, is there another place for it? In the case where I am doing a mixdown of two tracks 96khz/24 bit to 44100, no plugins - I imagine the bottleneck isn't in ardour either but libsamplerate.. re: 2) In the next couple years dual dual core systems will become common. So it sounds like doing "gang scheduling" in jack would be a way to get some boost. re: 3) I too already have a dual opteron system. It's working great under ardour. I really didn't expect it and preempt to play well together but I have days of uptime now. I guess I'll post to the jack and linux audio lists, somebody out there must want to build a quad-cpu box.... I just finished the minor mod to jack.udp to make it use multicast - works pretty good on a gigE switch, poorly on a wireless interface (but I expected that), haven't tried it on 10/100... Of course, in catching up with the lists today, I saw that sse support had been committed to jack in the past week. that should be nice!

taybin 2006-11-08 21:00 administrator ~0002720	Thanks for the offer though!

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2005-09-09 22:19	mtaht	New Issue
2005-09-09 22:19	mtaht	E-mail	=> mike.taht@gmail.com
2005-09-09 22:19	mtaht	Name	=> Mike Taht
2005-09-10 17:09	paul	Note Added: 0002322
2005-09-10 17:09	paul	Status	new => feedback
2005-09-10 17:44	mtaht	Note Added: 0002323
2005-09-10 18:50	mtaht	Note Edited: 0002323
2006-11-08 21:00	taybin	Status	feedback => resolved
2006-11-08 21:00	taybin	Resolution	open => no change required
2006-11-08 21:00	taybin	Assigned To	=> taybin
2006-11-08 21:00	taybin	Note Added: 0002720
2008-11-20 23:52	seablade	Status	resolved => closed