System Requirements

Questions about BrainVisa usage and installation

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Aaron
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System Requirements

Post by Aaron »

Hi guys,

I have a pretty easy question.

What are the system requirments for the BrainVISA Software to run correctly?

Video card?
RAM?
HDD Space?
Processos, etc.

I am hoping to run it on Fedora Core 4.......

Thanx a lot guys.
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riviere
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Post by riviere »

Hi,

Fedora Core 4 should be OK (I have to update the supported systems list).

The current distribution (3.0) needs about 450Mb disk space (it's rather big but it contains lots of things)

The RAM amount depends largely on what you are going to do with BrainVisa, but nowadays let's say that 1GB is a standard configuration, and if you intend to do some heavy processing on large data sets (diffusion processing...), you may consider buying a 2GB system.
It will run with less RAM either, but it might swap sometimes...

The processor depends only on the money you will put in it... any Intel 32 bit (itaniums are not supported) or AMD CPU is OK (we don't have an AMD64 version yet but it will run in 32 bit mode), multi-CPU machines are also OK (althrough not fully exploited by BV yet).

On Linux we strongly recommend a Nvidia video card if you want to be sure everything will be OK for anatomist (3D rendering), but we have been told that ATI cards now run correctly (we have not tested it): look at this topic.

Denis
Aaron
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Post by Aaron »

Thanx Denis.

That information helps me heaps.

Is there any specific NVidia Card that is recommended? Or a bare minimum card that I should aim to beat at least?

Thanx again.
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Yann Cointepas
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Post by Yann Cointepas »

Since most of the cards are designed for 3D games and we use only the basic part of 3D rendering (mainly surface rendering and flat texturing), I think any card can fit. I personaly bought a low-cost simple card without fan (I wanted as fex noise as possible) and Anatomist worked well with it. However, one important point is the amount of video memory. The more you have, the bigger are the object you can display. So if you want to be able to open many 3D windows at the same time, choose a card with at least 128 Mo of video memory.
Aaron
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Post by Aaron »

Thankyou very much.
yarikoptic
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Post by yarikoptic »

riviere wrote: The processor depends only on the money you will put in it... any Intel 32 bit (itaniums are not supported) or AMD CPU is OK (we don't have an AMD64 version yet but it will run in 32 bit mode), multi-CPU machines are also OK (althrough not fully exploited by BV yet).
Any plans for releasing amd64 native port?
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Yaroslav Halchenko
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Student Ph.D. @ CS Dept. NJIT, Master @ CS Dept. UNM
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Yann Cointepas
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Post by Yann Cointepas »

Everything compiles on 64 bit machines so we could make a package for that architecture. But it would be one more package to support and I am not sure it would make a difference on algorithms. When 32 bits machines will be rare in our lab, we will probably develop on 64 bit machine and release 64 bits development packages but stable packages will still be in 32 bits.
as_dub
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Post by as_dub »

Hello !
I use BV on a Fedora Core 6 / 64 bit, until now it works well ! (just a little bug with Mesa lib resolved in http://brainvisa.info/forum/viewtopic.p ... light=mesa) In case it helps...
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yarikoptic
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Re: System Requirements

Post by yarikoptic »

Having native amd64 package would be great. Now I am trying to run 3.1 on amd64 box and I get

$> brainvisa.3.1/setup.sh
Fontconfig warning: line 32: unknown element "cachedir"
Fontconfig warning: line 33: unknown element "cachedir"
Fontconfig error: "conf.d", line 1: no element found
Fontconfig warning: line 32: unknown element "cachedir"
Fontconfig warning: line 33: unknown element "cachedir"
Fontconfig error: "conf.d", line 1: no element found
Building BrainVISA cache
/usr/apps/brainvisa.3.1/bin/commands-links/brainvisa: line 74: 21504 Floating point exception$python -S -t -c "$runbrainvisa" "$0" "$@"
BrainVISA/Anatomist is now installed. Enjoy.

*$> brainvisa.3.1/bin/brainvisa
/usr/apps/brainvisa.3.1/bin/commands-links/brainvisa: line 74: 21520 Floating point exception$python -S -t -c "$runbrainvisa" "$0" "$@"

so it is not usable there
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Yann Cointepas
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Re: System Requirements

Post by Yann Cointepas »

The Fontconfig errors and warnings are due to a difference between a Linux library on the system we use to build packages (Fedora Core 4) and more recent Linux. It should not prevent things to work.

In your case, the real problem is this Floating point exception but we do not have amd64 computer so I cannot easily investigate where the problem comes from.
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