Thursday, 3 October 2013

Technical Thursday: A Users Guide to 64-Bit in a SCADA Environment

The benefits of 64 bit technology has been well documented and a large majority of new Windows server and desktop systems use this technology.

The main benefit of 64 bit over 32 bit hardware and operating systems is the amount of memory that is available. 

It is all about the bits, a 32-bit Operating Systems is typically restricted to 3.25GB of usable memory (RAM), but a 64-bit technology can theoretically use 16 EB or 17 billion GB of memory (RAM).  This means that expansion is virtually unlimited as to date the world has not created computer hardware, for normal personal or business use, that is able to utilise this amount of memory. With more memory comes faster data access and less hard disk activity resulting in more efficient multitasking.

In a SCADA system environment,  the visualisation and data connectivity clients need to use memory efficiently.  Wonderware InTouch, even with ArchestrA Graphics,  displays images and vector based graphics without excessive drain on the memory which means it does not demand machines with excessive amounts of memory.

With the introduction of WOW64 technology within Microsoft Windows, 32-bit applications such as InTouch run efficiently on 64-bit operating systems.  Indeed we recommend using a 64-bit system so that the operating system and other software requiring more memory will not impact on the efficient running of the SCADA.

64-bit really comes into its own with data historians.  When billions of data points are collected over long periods of time, 64-bit scalability and flexibility can be key.  Wonderware Historian 2012 is therefore 64 bit compatible and this will become increasingly important with the imminent release of Historian 2014 with 500,000 tag count and in subsequent 1,000,000 tag count versions.

Our technical consultants have these sorts of conversations with customers every day and can easily help you work out what CPU allocation and methodology is best.  Feel free to contact our technical support team you have any questions.


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