[ome-users] Hardware Requirements

[Ilya Goldberg]

Hi InCho
I think that other users have tried Red Hat Enterprise, so hopefully  
someone will respond regarding that.

OME doesn't require images to be stored locally.  All image access is  
done by talking to one or more OME Image Servers (OMEIS) over http.   
The OME data server (OMEDS) only stores references to the raw data on  
OMEIS.  The image data can be stored on multiple OMEISes (though that  
takes some fiddling with the configuration).

The OMEIS stores its data in a regular unix file-system.  The server  
itself is fairly light-weight in terms of code, though it does rely  
on Apache to do its work.  Ideally, the file-system would be local to  
the Apache/OMEIS process(es), though the rest of OME can be remote.   
The reason for local access has to do with how file locking and  
memory mapping is done on an NFS mount.  It can be done using NFS,  
but it may not be an ideal setup.  OMEIS benefits from high bandwidth  
I/O b/w disk and network, 64-bit architecture if you have very large  
files, and lots of RAM (which is used as a shared memory disk cache).

A lot depends on the average size of each image and the number of  
concurrent users you expect - not really how many files or the total  
size of the image store.  With a few users and relatively small  
images (up to several tens of megs each) it can be run very  
effectively on a relatively small machine - even if it maintains a  
multi-terabyte store.  I/O bandwidth is a priority followed by RAM,  
then CPU speed.  In real life, OMEIS is almost always I/O bound.   
We've run it on everything from PIV to Xeons to Opterons (not to  
mention PowerPC/OSX).

The data server has more complex requirements because it does a lot  
of different things.  I/O is not as big an issue as CPU and RAM.  If  
you provide more detail about the granularity of your data, how many  
concurrent users you expect, etc, maybe I or someone else could chime  
in with more specifics.
-Ilya


On Jul 6, 2006, at 3:28 PM, InCho Chong wrote:

> I am a newbie to this list and OME.  We are trying to setup a Linux
> based OME and I see instruction for Fedora Core 4.  I am hoping to use
> Red Hat Enterprise.
>
> I wanted to find out, if someone has information about:
>
> Hardware requirement (CPU, Memory and Harddisk)  We have about t 2
> terabytes is pixel data.  Does OME require that all these images to be
> stored locally or does it only store the metadata.  I was not able to
> find a clear systems requirement.
>
> Also, any help with Red Hat Enterprise installation would be great.
>
> Thanks in advance for the help.
>
> -- 
>
> -InCho
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