Multi-Core / Multi-Thread CPU support?

[Chris Legare]

Good day,

We're using a Platinum SCS version on an HP Z820 Workstation-grade computer with twin Xeon processors and NVIDIA K2200 Video cards in a research environment. We use this installation in order to perform various emergency scenarios re-enactments of a public setting. In doing so, we cue audio, video and network commands regularly.

Our SCS machine has 64 cores and 64 GB of RAM presently. Yet, despite these figures, we seemed to have reached a performance bottle neck faster than we expected unfortunately. While audio and video cues were still rolling with relative low latency, we observed simple network message commands being delayed by 2-5 seconds at times (...and sometimes up to 15sec) which throws off our cue timings badly.

Further live monitoring of SCS within Windows Task Manager revealed that SCS seems to be built around single process framework and not multi-core CPU systems as a single core seems to be doing all of the work and does reach a 100% load regularly. This leaves the other 63 cores mostly idling.

We are therefore wondering if there are any plans to capitalize on multicore /multi-thread CPU systems technology in the near future? (There is a rising number of these becoming available to the industry as a whole.)

If so, this would be much welcomed to help ensure snappy/reliable overall system response and would likely help pave the way to integrate the steady rise in popularity of other AV standards like NDI and DANTE natively within SCS.

SCS is great for us, and it seems like it would ultimately perform better if it could leverage the available resources in a multiprocessor / multi-thread environments.

Are you able to share any insights on whether or not such capabilities are in the card in the near future?
.... We would be happy to test a beta version out here...(!)

Regards,

Chris Legare

[Mike Daniell]

I'll need to do some research on this. SCS does use multiple threads, but does not assign these to specific processors. I understand there is a Windows function that can be used - SetProcessAfinityMask - but I haven't had a need to investigate this before.

Some SCS actions need to be processed by the main thread, especially actions that modify screen controls (apart from just updating screen control values).

[Chris Legare]

Hi,

Thank you for looking into this. Meanwhile, we will investigate the "SetProcessAfinityMask" feature to see if there is anything obvious in our systems setup. Looking forward to hearing more from you on this.

Best regards,

Chris Legare