Super structure module never done (Startools 1.7.458)

[Henrik]

I just went from 1.6 to 1.7.458 today and find that the Super structure module never finishes. Regardless of which variant I choose, I get a neverending (Well, I let it run for at least 30 minutes to see if something would eventually happen) rotating symbol in the bottom right corner. I never had any problems with the earlier Life module, where all variants were done quite quickly.

I’m running a Macbook Pro with Mac OS 10 (Mojave), with intel core i9, 32GB ram and lots of free space.

Any ideas what might be wrong?

[admin]

Hmmmm... That's a new one.

What sort of compute (GPU) resources are being used (see About dialog)?

[Henrik]

Thanks for your quick reply!

Compute resources (from ”About”):

CPU with 12 logical cores
AMD Radeon Pro 555X Compute Engine with 12 compute unites

I can just mention as well, that I wasn’t (after giving the permissions by ctrl-clicking and choosing open as per usual) able to launch the app using the regular ”Startools” button, but had to click the distro/StarTools app and choose ”Show package” and there under Contents/MacOS clicking the StarTools file, which seems to start it just fine. All things up until the Super structure module worked as they should

[admin]

Thank you Henrik. That is odd. I know of at least one user with the same graphics solution on macOS (though with a newer version than Mojave) where this works as expected. It is also possible to switch off GPU acceleration, however before we try that, does the issue happen when processing a much smaller image (for example something like 1000x1000 pixels)?

You can "unquarantine" StarTools so you can run it like a normal application (e.g. by double-clicking) using these instructions (click the screenshots to see more details in their captions).

[Henrik]

I tried with a small image and that worked fine with results after just like 10-20 seconds on a 700 x 1000 crop. After that I tried with a quite large image (maybe half of my initial 24MP image), and that also worked well, with maybe just a minute or two of processing time. I haven’t retried with the biggest image, but as you suspected the image size seems to have something to do with it.

[admin]

I tried with a small image and that worked fine with results after just like 10-20 seconds on a 700 x 1000 crop. After that I tried with a quite large image (maybe half of my initial 24MP image), and that also worked well, with maybe just a minute or two of processing time. I haven’t retried with the biggest image, but as you suspected the image size seems to have something to do with it.

Thank you for trying that. It appears your GPU is getting overwhelmed by the workload of the bigger image, causing the driver's watchdog timer to reset it because it thinks it is stuck (as it is taking too long).
Unfortunately, there is not an easy solution to this on macOS (on Windows or Linux this timeout is configurable more easy).

You can switch to CPU-only processing via a - for now - undocumented switch;
To activate the switch, create a file named 'openclforcecpu.cfg' (case sensitive) in the 'distro' folder. Upon (re)launching StarTools, during the splash screen you should hopefully see at the bottom of the screen that it is using your i9 CPU instead of the AMD GPU.

There is also this. However, unfortunately, I am not able to test or investigate this myself as these issues are all very hardware specific. The recovery timeout flag/feature seemed very intriguing and may well be a macOS way to keep the driver from shutting down compute tasks.

[Jamesmd]

Hi , I’m having exactly the same problem with the latest startools version on a MacBook Pro M1 max .
The process never does anything, but I have used it at some point , I don’t know if image weight was the difference . I’ll keep trying to see if find when it does work .

Thanks .

James

[Jamesmd]

Ok , it only works ii I binn35 %

[admin]

Hi James,

How big is the dataset you are processing before binning? (X by Y)

Thank you,

[hixx]

Hi James, Henrik,
have You tried to check the activity monitor? This should show You if the CPU/GPU are properly loaded with work or just idling around or had crashed.
I currently have a Mac Studio with M1 Max and I don't see this issue. Super Structure seems to route a lot of work to the GPU, though.

To provide some hint on the workload: I am processing 24 MB files usually. Depending on settings, SuperStructure will run a min or two with the 24-core GPU fully maxed out. CPU only it was usually 15 min or more.

I didn't see any problems switching from 1.6 (life) to 1.7 (SuperStructure) but that is strongly depending on the graphics card. At the time I used an I7 imac (late 2015) with AMD Radeon R390 which was OK for my 24MP files.


Regards,
Jochen