Hello there, hope you are all well.
I'm hoping someone can explain the benefits of using ArcGIS Pro in a Virtual Machine such as Azure. I am a GIS Masters student in my first semester and I am working on a project that is taking a long analysis time. Its not a complicated project, I'm calculating rooftop solar radiation. So I am using the Area Solar Radiation tool and a 0.7m DSM for an entire county. However, I have played with the tool settings and I do not seem to be making any headway on decreasing the analysis time. I feel bad for my poor computer, it hasn't had a moment of rest in days. So I have been researching Virtual Machine Computing, which I have no experience with.
There is a lot of information out there on the subject, but most of it is geared towards ArcGIS Enterprise or 3D rendering. I just wanted to know if a virtual machine could decrease my analysis time, and if so how does one go about doing that?
Thanks.
From the area solar radiation tool
... do some test runs with a coarser resolution or subset of your data to ensure the settings are correct before committing a run with the full-resolution data.
I find it hard to believe that you would have need a 0.7 m raster for a whole country to get the solar potential results that you need.
Perhaps you can clarify your workflow. Simply aggregating or filtering your elevations by a factor of 2 will reduce computations by approximately a factor of 4
Thank you for your response. I have run several tests with the tool, using a 10m DEM and decreasing the number of calculation directions, however, when I make the leap to the 0.7m it really increases the time.
Unfortunately I have not been able to find any other DEMs for my county (Rutland County, Vermont), other then the two I mentioned. I am indeed doing a rooftop analysis so its really important to have that 0.7m accuracy for the rooftops so I can get an accurate measurement of slope and aspect which are important later in calculating the potential of each rooftop. However, other then the rooftops I don't need the DEM/DSM to be so accurate, the 10m would be fine. However, I was under the impression that it was impossible to mosaic rasters of different cell sizes together, otherwise I would give that a try. I have everything projected to NAD '83 State Plane.
Some further comments, not necessarily in order...
(PS, my undergrad thesis circa 1977, Global Irradiance on Slopes )
Estimate Solar Power Potential | Learn ArcGIS
Thank you for your help in this.
Now I cannot comment on the specific tool but here is some documentation related to using ArcGIS Pro within Azure / AWS.
ArcGIS Pro on Microsoft Azure Cloud—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation
License ArcGIS Pro in a virtualized environment—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation
Running ArcGIS Pro in a virtualized environment—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation
This is where I would start to look for a more powerful machine. Now more powerful does not always mean faster .
Thank you for the documentation.
Unfortunately the Area Solar Radiation tool does not currently support parallel processing. So as you mentioned I am not sure if a virtualized environment would increase processing speed of not.
Thanks for the update. You may be correct on not supporting parallel processing and larger machine.
Definitely don't expect any miracles from a VM. A VM is just another virtual computer, and as such limited by the same constraints that are valid for your own desktop. A virtual processor is still tied to a core somewhere on the globe, and those cores may even be worse in single thread processing than your local PC if you are unlucky. Only when your geoprocessing tool supports parallel processing, could you see benefits of some VM with many virtual cores or GPU based processing. But unless you're willing to pay a significant sum, a truly powerful VM may be out of reach, unless your university offers specialized computing services for students.
Maybe cutting up your raster data set in smaller units, and compute those individually (in parallel), on multiple cores of your current machine, or multiple computers at the same time in your department, is the best bet to get results faster.