LAStools on cloud computing platform (AWS)

[Steven F]

Has anyone setup LAStools on a cloud computing platform like Amazon Web Services? How difficult is it? 

What about running it on a linux instance? Any problems with the tools not working correctly using WINE on these cloud platforms?

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello Steven,

several large clients of mine have particularly licensed LAStools for this very capability. The software excels in the AWS cloud with ease of operation and extreme scalability. A common scenario is renting 100 machines with 8 cores each, installing LAStools on all of them, processing several thousand square kilometer of LiDAR using tile-based and multi-core processing on all machines in parallel. and then saving the results, uninstalling the machines, and giving them back as soon as possible. To adapt LAStools for particular workflows it is also possible to "hire" me to come on-site and perform the necessary customization to your workflow and do some I/O optimization. Often folks will combine LAStools with raster processing software such as GDAL, their own in-house solutions, or other script-able software. Also OpenTopography has been using scripted LAStools driven by a server handling Web requests since 2011.

Would be nice to have someone chime in who is running LAStools scripted in the cloud, on a server, and in particular via AWS with some actual details. I have been meaning to write a blog article on the topic of running LAStools on a server / in the cloud / and else. Overall it has been my experience that my commercial clients rend to be a little hesitant to talk about how they use LAStools given the amount of work and know how that goes into designing efficient workflows... (-;

Regards from Costa Rica,

Martin @rapidlasso

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 7:53 PM, Steven F <steven.f...@gmail.com> wrote:

Has anyone setup LAStools on a cloud computing platform like Amazon Web Services? How difficult is it? 

What about running it on a linux instance? Any problems with the tools not working correctly using WINE on these cloud platforms?

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[Jonathan Greenberg]

We're running LASTools on a large cluster computer here at the University of Nevada, Reno.  Same basic principle as AWS.  We've found running it via wine is a great option, and fast enough.  I've made a singularity container (see one of my other posts for info) that makes it WAY easier to get LASTools running.  Wine can be a bit of a headache.  I'm seeing evidence of multicore working "natively" with singularity + wine.

One newer test I want to try out is -- Martin, do you still have those graphic calls in the "standard" version of LASTools that were giving us headaches a few years back?  I found we can use https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.6/doc/man/man1/Xvfb.1.xhtml as a possible work around to "route" graphics calls from Wine (so Wine thinks there's an active X11 window).  I found we needed to do this in singuarity for another command line program that still had graphics calls.