On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 09:48 -0700, Rongxiang Tang wrote:
I was wondering if I can run several freesurfers in my virtualbox simultaneously by setting up several virtual machines...my computer has 16G RAM and it's Windows 7 64-bit. Would working multiple freesurfers at the same time slow down the calculations? Moreover, I was wondering if my computer could afford these loads...
I can't speak for the virtualisation side, but it's certainly possible (even advisable) to run more than one copy of Freesurfer on a machine. I ran an experiment, running a recon-all instance on each of my box's four cores, and they were all complete in about 110% of the time of a single run - a big win.
Now with virtualisation, you'd also be running extra copies of the guest OS. Can you set up a single VM with multiple cores instead? If you have a quad core machine, give the VM three cores, and run three Freesurfer jobs on it. Trying it is the only way to be sure.
Richard