On Mon, 2011-04-04 at 13:13 +0200, Knut J Bjuland wrote:
I am in the process of acquiring a new computer to run freesurfer on. I am currently think about buying a PC with a geforce 4X0 and a Tesla card along with a two screen setup running either Ubuntu or Redhat Linux enterprise 6.0. I think the PC should be a core i7 with 6 core and above 12 gigs byte of ram. What kind of tesla card is recommend for using with Freesurfer? Will Freesurfer 5.1 also support cuda 4.0.
If your budget can withstand a Tesla C2050, by all means go for it. I've not checked in detail how much GPU RAM FreeSurfer requires, so it might be possible to run on a 'lesser' GeForce card. There's not enough double precision stuff to be significant in the GeForce vs Tesla choice. And I don't do overlapping transfers, which would be another factor. The main thing to do is make sure you have a 'Fermi' GPU - that's a Tesla 20 series, or GeForce GTX 400 or 500 series. Large speed ups depend on the Fermi card.
As for the CPU... just make sure it's Nehalem class. FreeSurfer on both the CPU and GPU likes fast RAM access.
As for CUDA 4.0 support.... that will depend on NVIDIA not breaking backwards compatibility (not an absolute given - they are not IBM). I don't expect any trouble, but until we upgrade to CUDA 4.0 here (and 3.2 just broke binary compatibility), I wouldn't want to promise anything.
HTH,
Richard