Oddbjørn Sæther wrote:
We plan to install FreeSurfer on a Linux server (probably SuSe 9),
Unless you have a compelling reason to run an old version of SuSE
(version 9 was released in October 2003), I would strongly recommend
using the current version, 10.1. Older versions of mainstream distros
will require increasing amount of maintenance to simply run current and
new versions of FreeSurfer.
How much memory will this "server" have? How many processors? These
specs are probably critical.
and run from Windows PCs via FreeNX/NXclient.
1. Will that work?
It *might* work. I have run FreeSurfer graphical apps with remote
display to Windows XP running cygwin. Personally, I would not recommend
doing this - remotely displaying the graphical FreeSurfer tools on any
platform can be painfully slow, even on a fast local 100MB/s LAN.
I don't know much about the FreeNX X server (Windows or otherwise). In
general though, of all the platforms to use, Windows is probably the
most difficult choice to remote display to. Other than display issues,
Windows machines would require a non-trivial amount of setup and
maintenance to seamlessly integrate with a Linux box running FreeSurfer.
2. What system requirements is advisable with 3-6 users?
What do you mean? FreeSurfer is quite memory and resource intensive. It
is not a good idea to run more than one instance of any FreeSurfer tool
on any single machine. If you are planning to install FreeSurfer on a
single "server", and have all your users remotely access this single
server to run tools and graphical apps, you will no doubt very quickly
bring the server to its knees.
In general, each FreeSurfer stream requires a single dedicated processor
and about 2GB of memory. So if you want four people to all use the same
machine, you'd need a machine with four processors and at least 8GB of RAM.
3. Is 3D graphics cards necessary on the Windows PCs (or how does this
work)?
Whatever the client OS, 3D graphics cards are necessary if you want to
use the graphical apps.
While the setup you describe might work, you might find yourself quickly
frustrated with performance issues, both on your single server, and
quite probably on your Windows clients.
The graphical FreeSurfer apps in particular are not specifically
designed to run in a client/server model, but should be run locally.
While a lot of the backend computational tools can easily be dispatched
to a different machine, you probably won't want to run more than one
stream on any one box/processor. Certainly three, or even two people
running a reconstruction stream on a lone server (unless it is a very
high end machine) would probably not be a good idea.
In fact, the best recommendation would be to install FreeSurfer locally
on each machine that you want to use. If you cannot replace your Windows
installations with Linux on the client PCs, you might want to think
about dual-boot or vmware-type options. If this is not viable, the best
case would be to get dedicated Linux (or Mac OS X) machines to use
FreeSurfer.
Cheers
-=R
--
Rudolph Pienaar, M.Eng, D.Eng / email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
149 (2301) 13th Street, Charlestown, MA 02129 USA
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