Is there a standard benchmark for FreeSurfer? I've been using the data under subjects (Bert?/Ernie?) and running a recon- all:
recon-all -s ernie -i ./sample-001.mgz -i ./sample-002.mgz -all
On our hardware using the 5.1 distributed binary (freesurfer-Linux- centos4_x86_64-stable-pub-v5.1.0.tar.gz) it takes about 12 hours.
I was surprised that 5.1 was running so much faster than 5.0. With 5.0 (freesurfer-Linux-centos5_x86_64-stable-pub-v5.0.0.tar.gz) it was taking about 18 hours. Did anyone else notice a big speed-up from 5.0 to 5.1? Maybe it's a difference between centos5 vs. centos4? If so, wouldn't you expect the former to be faster?
If I back-port the changes Nick made to configure.in for the dev branch to the stable release of 5.1 and build from source on our systems, I'm able to run in ~10 hours. I'm guessing this is mostly due to the difference in the versions of gcc used on our system (4.1.2) vs. those used for the centos4 distributed binary?
For the dev release, it's taking about ~11 hours. I'm guessing the dev branch is mostly focused on features/bug-fixes and performance is only looked at before a release?
Besides GPUs, what else are people doing to increase performance?
Cheers, Malcolm