StarTools

Hi all,

1.6.382 alpha previews some major updates to the engine, the application and compilation targets.

Along with a new (additional!) Denoise 2 module, much work has gone into further optimisations and making the engine more CPU data cache friendly.
Furthermore, two new executables have been added to take advantage of newer instruction sets found in modern systems (from Intel Haswell, or AMD Excavator and Ryzen CPUs onward). These executables have the postfix 'AVX2'.

Regardless of the executable version you are running, you should notice considerable speedups across the board, especially compared to 1.5 and lower.

Given that this alpha release has a lot of work done under the hood, I am keen to hear from you how the engine is behaving. Thank you in advance!

Ran the AVX version on some old data this evening and it performs faultlessly, so thanks once again for wonderful product development and support.

Haven't tried selecting things in the wrong places yet, but my impression is that some areas are quite a bit quicker on my i7 4790 3.60 GHz desktop. Haven't had a chance to try it on the AMD Ryzen 7 2700 3.2 GHz machinebut imagine that will be faster too.

almcl wrote:Ran the AVX version on some old data this evening and it performs faultlessly, so thanks once again for wonderful product development and support.

Haven't tried selecting things in the wrong places yet, but my impression is that some areas are quite a bit quicker on my i7 4790 3.60 GHz desktop. Haven't had a chance to try it on the AMD Ryzen 7 2700 3.2 GHz machinebut imagine that will be faster too.

Really appreciate the report - thank you!

As per my other post just ran latest StarTools-Windows64-AVX2 on my new AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 Core CPU (3.8GHz-4.6GHz/70MB CACHE/AM4)
RAM: 64GB DDR4 3200MHz with a 4072x2747 image and its pretty quick with no issues running through all the main modules.

Max

maxchess wrote:As per my other post just ran latest StarTools-Windows64-AVX2 on my new AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 Core CPU (3.8GHz-4.6GHz/70MB CACHE/AM4)
RAM: 64GB DDR4 3200MHz with a 4072x2747 image and its pretty quick with no issues running through all the main modules.

Max

Perfect! Thank you for letting me know.

Hi Ivo,
1.6 had a crash today upon "keep" the Life Modul result. I put the log file into my dropbox
https://www.dropbox.com/s/opcuahbehr6ws ... s.log?dl=0

kind regards,
hixx

hixx wrote:Hi Ivo,
1.6 had a crash today upon "keep" the Life Modul result. I put the log file into my dropbox
https://www.dropbox.com/s/opcuahbehr6ws ... s.log?dl=0

kind regards,
hixx

Thanks for that - really appreciate the uploads. I can't immediately see what would have caused this, but I'll keep trying to replicate.
I may have to ask you to upload the dataset as well if I can't figure out what's going on here...

Thanks again!

I uploded the stack as well.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p14jlm9cqkbbo ... .fits?dl=0

It`s actually a rather poor one. However I did not see any issues so far. I had a similar crash upon launching AUTODEV recently with another stack. Other attempts went fine, so it seems not to be a reproducable issue. It rather seems to be prone for timing issues.I bet if I'd redo this process it would work fine.
I should note, I am using an imac late 15 running Catalina OS (which also might be an issue in its own). I did not see this behaviour yet in StarTools 1.5, though.

Hi Ivo, just wanted to let you know I now had a similar issue in 1.5 when KEEPing a CROP result. So it rather "feels" like a MACOS Catalina issue for me rather than a StarTools fault. BTW similar crashes or strange error messages happen with other software on Catalina (Mail, Google Earth,...) - they rather should have called this trash "MAC OS Catastropha" - it seems to be the worst Apple product ever

Ivo, another crash (in 1.5) - this is what I found in the terminal, maybe that helps:

2019-12-07 07:27:53.017 StarTools[1918:27211] /Applications/StarTools Folder/StarTools.app/..//
2019-12-07 08:51:59.867 StarTools[1918:27211] Error while swapping tracking information to disk. Tracking information has likely been corrupted. Use the Undo button to recover previous tracking information. Free disk space for your /tmp folder and try again.
2019-12-07 08:52:04.318 StarTools[1918:27211] Error while swapping tracking information to disk. Tracking information has likely been corrupted. Use the Undo button to recover previous tracking information. Free disk space for your /tmp folder and try again.
Error
logout
Saving session...
...copying shared history...
...saving history...truncating history files...
...completed.