Planning hardware requirements

EMEN2 runs well on commodity servers running recent versions of Linux. For a typical lab, a 4-core machine with 16gb of memory and running CentOS 6.x or RedHat Linux should be adequate.

The more important consideration is storage. If you plan to use EMEN2 as a long term solution for archiving data from your lab, you will need to consider how much raw data is produced. The cost of storage tends to decrease every year, so you may want to plan on an initial 2-3 year period, and add new storage as needed. If you are using EMEN2 as an imaging database, consider how many images your group acquires per year, how many instruments are available or planned, and what the file sizes of typical images are. If you use automated data collection, or new detector technology, you may be surprised at how much data you collect.

For instance, at the NCMI our current machine is a 6-core 2.4ghz Xeon machine with 48GB of memory running CentOS. This done well with our current workload, which is typically about 10 concurrent users and 4 microscopes collecting data, and currently stores about 1/2 million images. Our storage device is a 60TB raid, comprised of 24 drives @ 3TB each. We have an identically configured server and RAID as our daily off-site rsync backup.

Please feel free to discuss hardware requirements on the mailing list or via email.