Hi James, hi Bruce
Thanks a lot for your help. I can confirm that make_average_subject did not used any swap memory in my case too when I tried to average 92 subjects with 5 GB RAM. Meanwhile I have 8 GB RAM and the process stopped before all 8 GB RAM are active.
Regards Juergen
On 2.2.2008 19:09 Uhr, "James N. Porter" porterj@umn.edu wrote:
So, I believe I have isolated the problem. The failure happens during the mri_concat phase of make_average_volumes. The seg-subj#.mgh temp files that are being concatenated are 65 MB each and I can successfully run 59 subjects, but for 60 subjects and up, mri_concat exits immediately with the error message as written below. I have 4GB of memory, and 65*59 is less than 4 GB so that works; add any more subjects and the process is shut down. It appears that mri_concat checks to see how much memory will be needed to hold all those .mgh files in active use, then checks the machine to see how much physical memory is available. I can easily set up a larger swap file to handle the full 175*65 that is needed (it will be insanely slow, but that's better than nothing). However, I can't get FreeSurfer to utilize the swap space I already have available.
I watched the whole make_average_volumes process play out on my resource monitor (I imagine that's what watching NASCAR is like--Come on, just crash already!) and while it came very close to using all 4GB--leaving a paltry 19 MB free at most points--it didn't touch the swap at any point during the run. This is not the case with Matlab and other programs, which will greedily eat up physical memory then seek out the swap. While I appreciate that the FreeSurfer programs are set up to be judicious consumers of resources, is there some sort of environmental variable in FreeSurfer or line of code in mri_concat that I can modify that would allow the programs to reach out and use the swap space?
Thanks, Jim
Jim Porter Graduate Student Clinical Science & Psychopathology Research University of Minnesota
James N. Porter wrote:
Juergen--Have you had successful resolution to this problem?
Nick--I'm attempting to average 175 subjects, but make_average_volume returns the same error as Juergen reports.
> Allocing output > MRIalloc(256,256,256): could not allocate 262144 bytes for 15547th
slice
I'm running freesurfer-Linux-rh9-stable-pub-v4.0.1 on SUSE Linux 9.3 2.6.11.4-21.17-smp x86_64, with a pair of Pentium 3.20 GHz processors, 4 GB of physical memory and 8 GB of swap memory. My limits are also quite liberal.
> cputime unlimited > filesize unlimited > datasize unlimited > stacksize unlimited > coredumpsize 0 kbytes > memoryuse unlimited > vmemoryuse unlimited > descriptors 1024 > memorylocked 32 kbytes > maxproc 28660I've tried to also use the alternative script posted by Doug Greve (http://www.mail-archive.com/freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/msg06641.html). That also returns the same error.
Any suggestions?
Many thanks,
Jim Porter Graduate Student Clinical Science & Psychopathology Research University of Minnesota
Nick Schmansky wrote:
Juergen,
Edit the 'make_average_subject' script removing (or commenting-out) the line 'limit descriptors unlimited'. You may have to do the same for 'make_average_surface' and 'make_average_volume'. Although in v4.0, these should already be commented-out.
Nick
On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 16:29 +0100, Juergen Haenggi wrote:
Dear FS experts
I tried to run make_average_subject in the past with 92 subjects and got the following error: Cannot allocate memory. This is now on the to-do list of the FS website. Then I bought some additional RAM and changed from OS X tiger to leopard. Now I tried it again and get this error:
[Macintosh-3:/Applications/freesurfer/subjects] juergenhaenggi% limit descriptors 4096 [Macintosh-3:/Applications/freesurfer/subjects] juergenhaenggi% limit cputime unlimited filesize unlimited datasize 6144 kbytes stacksize 8192 kbytes coredumpsize 0 kbytes memoryuse unlimited descriptors 4096 memorylocked unlimited maxproc 266 [Macintosh-3:/Applications/freesurfer/subjects] juergenhaenggi% make_average_subject --subjects SNPs_Vp* limit: descriptors: Can't remove limit (Invalid argument) [Macintosh-3:/Applications/freesurfer/subjects] juergenhaenggi%
I set the descriptor limit to 4096, but the make_average_subject command will not start anymore.
Any idea what is wrong here?
Thanks in advance Best regards Juergen
Juergen Haenggi Ph.D. (Dr. des.) Division of Neuropsychology Institute of Psychology University of Zurich Binzmuehlestrasse 14, PO Box 25 8050 Zurich, Switzerland 0041 44 635 73 97 (phone office) 0041 76 445 86 84 (phone mobile) 0041 44 635 74 09 (fax office) BIN 4.D.04 (office room number) j.haenggi@psychologie.uzh.ch (email) http://www.psychologie.uzh.ch/neuropsy/ (website) http://www.juergenhaenggi.ch (private website)
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----------------------------------------------------------- Juergen Haenggi Ph.D. (Dr. des.) Division of Neuropsychology Institute of Psychology University of Zurich Binzmuehlestrasse 14, PO Box 25 8050 Zurich, Switzerland 0041 44 635 73 97 (phone office) 0041 76 445 86 84 (phone mobile) 0041 44 635 74 09 (fax office) BIN 4.D.04 (office room number) j.haenggi@psychologie.uzh.ch (email) http://www.psychologie.uzh.ch/neuropsy/ (website) http://www.juergenhaenggi.ch (private website) -----------------------------------------------------------