Hi, My group is buying a new computer we will use in the Martinos Center. I emailed Paul Raines via help and he gave me some guidelines as to what type I should get, but I still have some questions.
1. HDD speed: How hard disk (I/O speed) intensive is freesurfer? What kind of speed difference will having a RAID make? Would there be a big difference from plain SATA?
2. RAM amount: How much memory does running recon-all for one subject generally require? Is it 0.5-1.5GB? Would 2GB be enough to run two simultaneously or do I need 4GB? Or 6GB? How much RAM does running a group map for functionals need?
3. RAM speed: We are buying DDR400 PC3200 RAM. Should I bother paying more for low-latency timings?
4. Graphics speed: What speed graphics card is good enough for tkmedit and tksurfer? Is a Geforce 6000 series plenty, or does having a 7000 series make any difference?
5. Has anyone tried clustering computers together to spread the processing? Should we look into this for our three P4 1Ghz machines?
Maybe you could add this information to the Machine Requirements wiki pages? https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/FreeSurferBeginnersGuide https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/SystemRequirements
Thanks, Kayle
Kayle,
Your questions are addressed below:
On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 14:51 -0400, kslays@bu.edu wrote:
Hi, My group is buying a new computer we will use in the Martinos Center. I emailed Paul Raines via help and he gave me some guidelines as to what type I should get, but I still have some questions.
- HDD speed: How hard disk (I/O speed) intensive is freesurfer? What kind of
speed difference will having a RAID make? Would there be a big difference from plain SATA?
freesurfer is not too hard disk intensive. It is highly memory and CPU intensive (lots of matrix operations).
- RAM amount: How much memory does running recon-all for one subject generally
require? Is it 0.5-1.5GB? Would 2GB be enough to run two simultaneously or do I need 4GB? Or 6GB? How much RAM does running a group map for functionals need?
2GB is what we recommend as the minimum. 4GB is preferable if you're going to run group map stuff or two subjects simultanously.
- RAM speed: We are buying DDR400 PC3200 RAM. Should I bother paying more for
low-latency timings?
I don't know whether such RAM makes a difference. If you have the money, then anything to speed-up CPU/memory performance is best.
- Graphics speed: What speed graphics card is good enough for tkmedit and
tksurfer? Is a Geforce 6000 series plenty, or does having a 7000 series make any difference?
A standard graphics card is fine. The requirements for games now-a-days far out-specs the needs of freesurfer graphics, so most any modern card is fine. We use NVIDIA cards in our Linux boxes. Make sure you have the most up-to-drivers for these cards though.
- Has anyone tried clustering computers together to spread the processing?
Should we look into this for our three P4 1Ghz machines?
Freesurfer is not setup to run in parallel (although some people have created course parallelization scripts). The cluster we use exists to run multiple subjects in parallel (group studies).
Maybe you could add this information to the Machine Requirements wiki pages? https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/FreeSurferBeginnersGuide https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/SystemRequirements
Thanks, Kayle _______________________________________________ Freesurfer mailing list Freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu https://mail.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/freesurfer
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Nick Schmansky