Dear Ajay,
On 26 Aug 2009, at 01:38, Ajay Garg wrote:
> Dear FSL users
>
> The snow leopard is coming this Friday. They say it can make use of
> multiple processors. I
> have 8-core Mac Pro? What could be advantage in the processing time
> of TBSS? Will there
> be any need for SGE grid engine installation?
>
> Regards.
> Ajay
>
As far as I'm aware all versions of MacOS X have been able to use
multiple processors where available, however, FSL scripts and programs
are not inherently able to use multiple processors, i.e., "threaded".
Instead these scripts use scheduling software, SGE, and divide the
tasks into smaller, independent parallelisable sections. This form of
parallel processing has the advantage that it is compatible with using
both multiple processors and multiple hosts and doesn't need any
complex thread code to achieve parallelism.
So the short answer is that any of Snow Leopard's new multiple
processor capabilities are not going to make any difference to TBSS
or any other FSL software. You still need SGE or similar installed to
take advantage of your Mac's multiple cores.
Regards, Dave
--
Dave Flitney, IT Manager
Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain
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