Advice for offline image analysis computer

[mahogny]

Martin Spitaler wrote:

> Dear Christophe,
>
>   you got a lot of replies already, just a few details that are still missing:
>
> - WinXP-64 in combination with 16GB RAM really makes the difference between
> work and crash if you open seriously large image files, and it even helps
> with software that doesn't actually support it (because then Windows puts
> the page file in the memory beyond 3GB instead of the harddrive, which is
> obviously much faster). But be aware, some software simply doesn't run on
> WindXP-64, e.g. ironically the Leica confocal software and Zeiss ZEN (the
> old LSM software works fine!!).
>  

here I need to add that if your software indeed does load that many
images into the memory
you should look for something better. by doing so you will have a severe
I/O bottleneck;
make sure data is loaded partially by the software. only time you need
that much memory is
when you actually have that much *modified* data in memory or as a cache
for a really
high-performance image store server. any other valid cases are exotic.

/Johan

[mahogny]

Craig Brideau wrote:
> Does anyone use those SAS hard drives in their machines?  I'm just using
> SATA; I was wondering if SAS was a substantial improvement (i.e. worth the
> extra cost)?
>  
SATA here. I think the cost is the small problem; maintenance is worse.
I expect the same problem as SCSI has, that is,
interfaces become obsolete way too fast and finding spare parts is hard.
but if you run a server, need the performance and
can afford the work to maintain it, don't hesitate. a SATA RAID array
might give the same performance though, with less trouble,
and other advantages.

--
--
------------------------------------------------
Johan Henriksson
MSc Engineering
PhD student, Karolinska Institutet
http://mahogny.areta.org http://www.endrov.net

[Nowell, Cameron]

SAS drives are much faster and being enterprise class hardware will last
longer (on average). Of course there is a couple of tradeoffs. One being
the cost of them, here in Australia a 320GB SATA drive will cost you
about $100 while the equivalent SAS drive is $770. The second thing is
the noise they make. SAS drives are more for the server environment, so
they spin at 15,000 rpm (sounds like a jet taking off when they spin
up).

SAS doesn't suffer the problems of configuration of SCSI, these issues
are on of the reason for SAS being created.


Cheers


Cam


Cameron J Nowell
Microscopy Research and Imaging Core Facility
Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre
12 St Andrews Place
East Mebourne, 3002
Victoria, Australia

Phone: [phone]
Fax:       [phone]
Mobil:  [phone]



-----Original Message-----
From: Confocal Microscopy List [mailto:[hidden email]]
On Behalf Of Johan Henriksson
Sent: Wednesday, 24 September 2008 6:10 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: Advice for offline image analysis computer


Craig Brideau wrote:
> Does anyone use those SAS hard drives in their machines?  I'm just
using
> SATA; I was wondering if SAS was a substantial improvement (i.e. worth
the
> extra cost)?
>  
SATA here. I think the cost is the small problem; maintenance is worse.
I expect the same problem as SCSI has, that is,
interfaces become obsolete way too fast and finding spare parts is hard.
but if you run a server, need the performance and
can afford the work to maintain it, don't hesitate. a SATA RAID array
might give the same performance though, with less trouble,
and other advantages.

--
--
------------------------------------------------
Johan Henriksson
MSc Engineering
PhD student, Karolinska Institutet
http://mahogny.areta.org http://www.endrov.net

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[Andreas Bruckbauer]

Matlab does benefit from multicore processors. Multi-threading in MATLAB 7.4
(R2007a) can be set via MATLAB's preferences. This enables implicit
multihreading and does not need any additional toolbox or changes in the
code. It works for elementwise computations and can be tested by a simple
matrix multiplication. They provide a demo in the documentation. If you run
the Windows taskmanager (for windows users) at the same time and choose the
matrix dimension big enough  you can see the load increase on all cores
simultaenously. However on my standard analysis it does not help much.