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I've been asked to build a system with 48 cameras.
3 of them will be 640x480 but with low framerate.
In fact with the 320x240 cameras, I believe that 5fps ill be enough with modec, so that makes around 240fps.

I'm thinking to build it with 4 PCI-e PV981-16 cards (if i find someone who has them).

The system where I want to install them is a Dual QuadCore PowerEdge server with 16GB of RAM, and each card will have its own pci-e bus (so I assume full bandwidth for each one).

For the storage, a PowerVault MD1000 should make it. It's really fast and expandable.

What do you guys think of the setup?

Where you will run into trouble is viewing. No one will be able to view a montage, as not desktop can view 48 streams in a browser. The system may handle it, but the client may not. And 16 bt878 chips will not saturate a PCI buss so go ahead and use the cheap cards.

Any info on the CPUs?

I just looked into the product specs for the PowerVault and all I can say is: *drool*.

Let us know how the build goes. Just remember to choose the right RAID setup for your system. I myself don't mind using any kind of disk spanning. All events are stored on their own logical drive. So if one of the physical disks dies in the logical volume the OS remains unharmed.

For this I use Linux LVM. However, combined with RAID you get redundancy. For the current system I'm building that's not worth the cost.

If you are going to be writing lots of data to the disk very quickly you may want to do some research. Software RAID5 may not be the best option when you are writing this amount of data to the disk.

SlovakJoe wrote:Any info on the CPUs?

I just looked into the product specs for the PowerVault and all I can say is: *drool*.

Let us know how the build goes. Just remember to choose the right RAID setup for your system. I myself don't mind using any kind of disk spanning. All events are stored on their own logical drive. So if one of the physical disks dies in the logical volume the OS remains unharmed.

For this I use Linux LVM. However, combined with RAID you get redundancy. For the current system I'm building that's not worth the cost.

Lee Sharp wrote:Where you will run into trouble is viewing. No one will be able to view a montage, as not desktop can view 48 streams in a browser. The system may handle it, but the client may not. And 16 bt878 chips will not saturate a PCI buss so go ahead and use the cheap cards.

Well, the maximum attainable framerate for the setup with 4 PV981-16 is 480fps. Given I suppose I'm going to need as much as compute power as possible, and for that I need a dual box, it won't hurt either that it comes with an Intel 5400 chipset.

That means 4 independent PCI-e x4 buses, one for each card.

SlovakJoe wrote: Any info on the CPUs?
I just looked into the product specs for the PowerVault and all I can say is: *drool*.

Well, the chosen system is a PowerEdge 2900-III enrackable tower. I guess I'll go with the cpus I use for my cluster setups:

2 Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5430 2x6MB Cache, 2.66GHz 1333MHz FSB

Of course, for storage there's just one option: Mirroring for the system disks and we'll see what happens with RAID5 for the storage.

I have a few 480 fps systems, all on PCI cards only. The buss is not full, but memory is another story.

Lee Sharp wrote:I have a few 480 fps systems, all on PCI cards only. The buss is not full, but memory is another story.

Certainly, good to know

What memory requirements do you usually consider for this kind of setup?

Will 8GB be too low?

How do your systems handle load with 2 or 3 clients (16 cameras for each physical monitors, I suppose?)

Sorry for the delay...

Anyway, my systems are all 32 bit, so memory is 3.5 gig or so. I strip down the video to make more ram available.

As to concurrent load, I have from much over 35 streams to be tough for the server to do smoothly. I have not looked closely to see where it is bottlenecking at, but I suspect memory.