Parallel processing of batched geoprocessing tasks

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10-04-2012 04:03 PM
Status: Open
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AdamForknall
Occasional Contributor III

It's well known that ArcGIS only takes advantage of multiple processing threads to allow a single geoprossesing task to occur in the background while still interacting with the GUI. Any further processing is placed in a queue. A signifficant improvement on this (other than making the whole program multi-thread capable) would be to make batch geoprocessing tasks utilise more than the single thread currently used. If I run a batch of 4 Clip processes, there's probably no reason that at least two can't be run on parallel threads on a modern workstation (even my 3 year old workstation has 4 cores).

This could also provide some relief for the fact that ArcGIS for Desktop is 32-Bit and hence somewhat hamstrung by limited memory access - processing large datasets which run out of memory could be done by breaking them down into tiles and running the required geoprocess on the tiles in parallel.

5 Comments
AaronAddison
It would be really nice if geoprocessing tasks were thread assignable.
VytautasGipiskis
SP1 for ArcGIS 10.1 Desktop will add paralelel processing. Stay tuned.
AdamForknall
don't hold your breath vgipiskis
JoeChampagne
Background geoprocessing at 10.1 accomodates 64-bit architecture, and you're limited to (IIRC) 60% of your total system memory rather than 2 GB. It's still possible to run out of memory (as I just did a moment ago with a Model) but it's a marked improvement over foreground geoprocessing.
AdamForknall
indeed it does jchampagne2 , however it does not accommodate parallel processing, which is the who point of this idea :-)