What EC2 works best for zephyr lite?

[octadud]

I dont need super fast turn around time, but currently going from images to textured mesh takes about a day on my pc at home. It's loud and causing my bedroom to heat up. I would like to instead use AWS to free up my computer for other uses and get faster turn around time of mesh generation.

Any advice on how to do this? I am thinking that I mainly see zephyr using mostly cpu on many steps and a little bit of gpu on some steps. Which instance of EC2 would be cost effective yet reduce the turn around time of meshes?

[Andrea Alessi]

Hi octadud,

most phases uses GPU. Some phases by nature can only use GPU, but the most computation intensive parts are run on GPU (keypoint extraction, depthmap generation, photoconsistency, .. ).

You should check your log to see what is happening. From what you say, most likely, zephyr is switching to CPU as you probably don't have enough memory. If this happen during photoconsistency, expect long computation times.

If you wish to use EC2, here are a couple of pointers:

Make sure to use a remote desktop software that supports openGL2 (hamachi logmein, splashtop, etc) - microsoft's rdp does not, so if you use RDP you won't be able to start zephyr as it needs opengl2 to render the workspace.

You can find an aws image in the AWS ireland marketplace already (search for 3Dflow, password is 3Dflow) that while a bit old, is already setup for zephyr - a lot of users reports difficulties with aws in setting up their driver, as they only install the nvidia graphic driver, while (if i recall correctly) you also have to setup the grid one.

Remember to deactivate zephyr from the help menu (unless you're on the steam edition) so that you can safely switch from your pc to your VM and viceversa.