[mapserver-users] Enhancing MapServer performance with GPUs

[Visit Hirankitti]

Many thanks for your advices, I made a survey on a graphic card for a Dell
server, such as NVIDIA Tesla K4, the price is so high, something like
$6,700, so I have to evaluate whether I worth the money.

Is the OpenGL included and used by MapServer as a default or we need to
compile it ourselves in order to use it? If that is the case, how can we do
that?

Visit

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 5:50 AM, Adam Eskreis <aeskreis at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's been a while since I've looked at the Mapserver code, but if I'm not
> mistaken it uses the fixed function pipeline for OpenGL which isn't going
> to be able to take advantage of all of those wonderful shader cores very
> well.  If you wrote your own renderer using OpenGL 4.0+, you might be able
> to get a substantial boost in rendering performance, but as Paul said,
> rendering may not be your bottleneck.  You should ensure that it is before
> spending a lot of money on GPU servers.  Also something to keep in mind,
> when you render with OpenGL you must convert all of your polygons into
> triangle meshes, which can be an extremely costly operation, especially for
> concave polygons that contain holes, which are quite common in GIS data.
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 5:42 PM, Paul Ramsey <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca>
> wrote:
>
>> Non-trivial places time can be spent:
>>
>> - CGI startup (if you aren't using FastCGI)
>> - reading layers (if you have a lot of them! it's only a ms or two per
>> layer, but if you have 100 layers...)
>> - reading data
>> - rendering data
>> - compressing output images (more than you'd expect)
>>
>> I'd expect GPU assisted rendering to be a win only for a narrow
>> minority of cases, it's not a predominant time sink as often as one
>> would expect. Plus for all the speed once you have the GPU chain set
>> up, the setting up of the GPU can be costly, and for a CGI program
>> like MapServer, that's a big deal.
>>
>> P
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Even Rouault
>> <even.rouault at mines-paris.org> wrote:
>> > Le dimanche 15 juin 2014 23:50:05, Visit Hirankitti a écrit :
>> >> Dear list memers,
>> >>
>> >> My name is Visit, a newbie of this forum. I have been using MapServer
>> for
>> >> at least 4 years now on many research projects. It has served my
>> research
>> >> projects quite well.
>> >>
>> >> Recently I am using MapServer to develop a real-world enterprise web
>> >> application.
>> >> I am developing a web-based GIS application using MapServer to serve
>> >> thousands of users, and one of overheads of the system is on the map
>> >> rendering provided by MapServer.
>> >>
>> >> At the moment the server I use to run MapServer doesn't have a graphic
>> card
>> >> (i.e. GPUs), but I wonder if I really want high performance of
>> >> map-rendering from MapServer, can a graphic card (i.e. GPUs) equipped
>> with
>> >> the server enhance MapServer's map rendering speed and hence improve
>> its
>> >> map service speed?
>> >>
>> >> As a graphic card contains hundreds of GPU cores, e.g. NVDIA CUDA
>> platform,
>> >> and each core can compute and draw polygons in parallel, so I think
>> this
>> >> can improve the speed of map rendering (if used with MapServer)
>> >> substantially. Do I understand this correctly?
>> >
>> > You'll have to profile where the time is exactly spent in MapServer. If
>> it is
>> > in pulling data from sources, or in the rendering part itself. There's a
>> > OpenGL backend available in recent MapServer versions that could
>> potentially
>> > speed up rendering, but it is likely a bit experimental and might need
>> more
>> > work.
>> >
>> >>
>> >> Thanks for your advice in advance,
>> >>
>> >> Visit Hirankitti Ph.D.
>> >>
>> >> Intelligent Communication and Transportation Lab
>> >> King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang
>> >> Thailand
>> >
>> > --
>> > Geospatial professional services
>> > http://even.rouault.free.fr/services.html
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