16.46. parallel_sfs

The program parallel_sfs is a wrapper around sfs (Section 16.61) meant to divide the input DEM into tiles with overlap, run sfs on each tile as multiple processes, potentially on multiple machines, and then merge the results into a single output DEM. It has the same options as sfs, and a few additional ones, as outlined below.

Examples for how to invoke it are in the SfS usage chapter.

Usage:

parallel_sfs -i <input DEM> -n <max iterations> -o <output prefix> \
  <images> [other options]

Command-line options for parallel_sfs:

--tile-size <integer (default: 300)>

Size of approximately square tiles to break up processing into (not counting the padding).

--padding <integer (default: 50)>

How much to expand a tile in each direction. This helps with reducing artifacts in the final mosaicked SfS output.

--processes <integer>

Number of processes to use on each node (the default is for the program to choose).

--num-processes <integer>

Same as --processes. Used for backwards compatibility.

--nodes-list <filename>

A file containing the list of computing nodes, one per line. If not provided, run on the local machine. See also Section 8.16.

--threads <integer (default: 8)>

How many threads each process should use. This will be changed to 1 for ISIS cameras when --use-approx-camera-models is not set (Section 16.61), as ISIS is single-threaded. Not all parts of the computation benefit from parallelization.

--resume

Resume a partially done run. Only process the tiles for which the desired per-tile output files are missing or invalid (as checked by gdalinfo).

--suppress-output

Suppress output of sub-calls.

-v, --version

Display the version of software.

-h, --help

Display the help message.