OK, D or Dave or any of you that want to play....
We are loving out new fast computers. However they are too slow.
Right now one is churning on our blue whale project. To do all the steps it requires about 40 minutes per image. If everything works with no crashes it will still take several weeks of process time. The software license is for just one seat so we can't split the project up without spending 35K on another seat of the software. The software will happily run on a twin CPU machine with all the RAM possible. The project we are doing is 5,116 photos and each photo image 1.1 Gig.
It makes a giant mosaic image of several thousand tiles. It will be over one TB as a final deliverable.
According to Microsoft Win 7 Pro can address 192 GB of ram.
We are doing the mental masturbation and wondering what is realistic to build. Our current computer motherboard can only hold 32 Gig max and that is what they have.
Lets play the build the dream machine. We want a rack mount, dual CPU multi-core computer with lots more RAM than the measly 32 Gig. It will have to have a top end 3D video card to do the stereo for aerial triangulation. And just a DVD drive to load software. Some sort of internal RAID with stripe & mirror 2 or 3 TB is size.
We will likely buy the computer after we get paid for the blue whale job.