Options for periodic access to mega Revit Project

[Duncan Lithgow]

I'm working as Revit Support man on a hospital expansion project here in Denmark which is quite large. We're dealing with about 400,000 m2 (that's 4.3 million sqft). This is a campus project divided into many building which keeps the individual file sizes managable.

For doing QA on the project I need to be able to open a file which links in the whole 400,000 m2 at once. Then I can make schedules and filters to highlight areas which deviate from our standards (eg. using out of date families).

Assumptions:
- I'm assuming that beefing up a single pc is not feasable
- At a rough count we're dealing with about 60 building averaging about 100 MB, that 6 GB
- We've got a machine with 32 GB RAM that still crawls

I'll open the floor to any ideas - so what are our options?

[rosskirby]

Aside from using worksets to open only the information that you want to schedule for QA (furniture, lights, whatever), there's probably not a computer available that's going to be able to handle that kind of file size. You can either limit the information in one file (via worksets) or run the QA schedules on smaller chunks of the campus (i.e. 5 buildings at a time, rather than 60, or whatever other grouping makes sense).

[Duncan Lithgow]

I was kind of hoping someone has Revit installed on a Windows OS virtualised in a *nux based computing grid. If I could buy remote access to that then it would just be a matter of getting all the files to that machine. The RAM limit for Windows 7 64bit version Professional and above is 192 GB [1]. Based on the guidlines around for RAM [2] that is way above what I need - I'm wondering if my problem here is CPU speed?

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/max-memory-limits-for-64-bit-windows-7/4254
[2] http://bim9.com/2012/01/13/how-much-ram-do-i-need/