I believe folks use the freesurfer binary archive expanded/installed on file servers that are remotely mounted, e.g., thru NFS, so everyone can share a common installation. IT/dev-ops can implement that in different ways, e.g., maybe the freesurfer installation actually lives on a fast RAID/redundant file system over NFS, etc. But you ultimately need to set FREESURFER_HOME in your shell environment point to wherever freesurfer is installed which could be a remote mount point on your local computers file system. Hopefully a remote mount point to the freesurfer installation (via NFS) is standardized to be the same path for everyone on their local machines.

Fast disks and fast filesystems can always help with speeding up read/writes of data. SSD storage hanging off the latest PCIe buss designs should outperform hard drives. Users often have a local disk in their machine to process data (preferably not the same disk as the boot partition is on). Or maybe IT has some available storage over NFS for users to process their data, though read/writes over NFS are going to be slower than working off a local disk (with or w/o -openmp). You could use soft links to point to different parts of the data if you wanted to physically re-locate pieces of it, but any paths thru soft links should make it look like there is a single tree with the data.

- R.

On Jul 15, 2019, at 05:06, Robin Warne <R.Warne@kent.ac.uk> wrote:

External Email - Use Caution

Hi folks,

I am new to the Freesurfer world and I have a couple of questions about installing the application, specifically around the 10Gb “footprint” of data, after unpacking the archive file.

So I have run through the installation and configuration steps outlined on the Wiki page, which is great, by the way! Running through the steps first time around went without a hitch but the conversion of the sample data took many hours. If I have to run that conversion again, I will try the recon-all with “ -openmp { some appropriate value } “ to try and speed it up.

I’m guessing that the sample data is occupying a large part of the 10Gb disk space “footprint” so is it appropriate to remove it, without breaking anything? If we wanted to install Freesurfer on to a server, for multiple users to access, is that possible? Somewhere like ‘/usr/local’, as described in the Wiki?

Thanks in advance, for any guidance anyone can offer.

Robin Warne,
University of Kent (U.K.)

_______________________________________________
Freesurfer mailing list
Freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
https://mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/freesurfer