SPM/Advice on hardware selection

SPM requirements in terms or hardware are closely related to those of MATLAB, see:

• MATLAB System Requirements
• Choosing Hardware for Use with MATLAB
• Computer hardware which best optimizes the performance of MATLAB

Processor

No particular requirements, apart from those for MATLAB. The faster the better but little memory or a slow hard disk can become a bottleneck so make sure to have a coherent hardware installation.

Mono-/multi-processors

Recent MATLABs support implicit multiprocessing allowing to run multiple threads on a single machine without any change to the MATLAB code itself: this requires a multiple CPU (multiprocessor or multicore) system. The gain in compute time with SPM is not dramatic though.

See:

• http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/matlab_prog/brdo29n-1.html
• http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/ref/maxnumcompthreads.html

If you run many MATLAB sessions in parallel to manually distribute your SPM processings, it is recommended to set the number of computational threads to one.

Some effort is currently done to provide a parallel version of SPM that could automatically distribute tasks on a multicore/multiprocessor machine or a cluster.

32/64 bit

Major Operating Systems, MATLAB and SPM support 64bit architectures and are nowadays recommended.

Memory

The more RAM you have the better but SPM should accommodate with any amount of memory you have (provided there is enough for MATLAB itself). Remember that a 32 bit Operating System might not be able to make use of the full amount of memory.

For more information, see:

• http://www.mathworks.com/support/tech-notes/1100/1106.html
• http://www.mathworks.com/support/tech-notes/1100/1107.html

Hard Disk

Neuroimaging datasets can be quite large so a slow hard disk can be a bottleneck for SPM processing. (I.e. if you've got the choice, choose the hard disk with the highest RPM. For even more performance, use multiple hard drives in a RAID1 or other RAID setup). Concerning the capacity, it's also obviously the more the better.

Reviews of hard disks

http://www.storagereview.com

Network File System

It is certainly possible to store your datasets on an NFS server. If the server is located in another building or section of your building, make sure the entire connection to your SPM processing workstation is at least 100MB/s.

Graphic Card

At current time little use is made of the GPU in SPM so the graphic card should not have any impact in SPM processing.