AMIRA / AVIZO Workstation PC
Avizo and Amira are two separate packages that are used for
similar but distinct purposes.
Avizo is a commercial data visualization and analysis tool
that supports 2D and 3D visualizations in areas such as materials research,
tomography, non-destructive testing and more.
Amira on the other hand, works in the same domain, but is
one of the most popular packages to deal with medical imaging data in the
world. It’s application also extend to fields such as quantum physics and
materials science.
System Recommendations for Amira / Avizo:
The main determinant of how much horsepower you’ll need to
run either of these packages is highly dependent on the size and complexity of
your data set.
The software can be hard on all four main computer
components: GPU, CPU, RAM and secondary storage such as HDD or SSD.
GPU
Of these four components, the GPU is by far the most
important. Due to the nature of the sorts of computing the software performs
it’s ideally suited to GPU parallel processing.
Both packages will run on any GPU that supports OpenGL 2.1
and up, but the memory size is critical and may need to be very large for
professional workloads.
The good news is that the latest generation of consumer
cards such as the GTX 1080 and Titan X (Pascal) have significantly more VRAM
than previous generations. It’s now quite normal to have more than six
gigabytes of VRAM and as much as twelve GB on consumer cards. When we look at
professional GPUs such as the Quadro range we see VRAM counts over 20GB, but
unless you have a specific reason to believe your dataset will require this
much it’s unlikely, you’ll need that amount of RAM.
Quadro cards give a better assurance of reliability and
driver compatibility, but for a much lower asking price one can have the same
performance. Therefore, unless reliability is absolutely mission critical, we
recommend a high-end consumer card such as the GTX 1080 or the Titan X
For certain types of processing multiple-GPUs can be
employed as well, which may also support a decision to have, for example, two
Titan X cards as opposed to a single Quadro card.
RAM
These applications are true RAM hogs. Luckily the developer
has provided us with a simple rule of thumb. Complex data sets
require RAM six to eight times as large. So, if you have a
4GB data set 32GB of RAM would be a good idea.
Storage
This is pretty straightforward. These are massive data
streams and the faster the drive channeling all that info, the less likely you
are to have a system-slowing bottleneck. We recommend a fast NVMe SSD to really
give the other components the room to stretch their legs.
CPU
We also have great guidelines from the developer on CPU
requirements. The CPU-dependent components of the software is generally pretty
well multi-threaded. However, returns diminish once you go past eight cores. At
this point clock frequency and cache have a bigger effect. In other words,
having a dual-socket system with two fat Xeon quad cores or one eight core Xeon
with lots of cache and as much frequency as you can squeeze out of it is
optimal.
Basically AMIRA / AVIZO needs the fastest clock speed in
about 8 cores. As far as a dual CPU system, the only recommended CPU option is
2x Xeon Gold 6136 or 6154 which can reach a top speed of 3.7Ghz.
For more information on this application please visit their
website at:
AVIZO / AMIRA
LIST OF COMPATIBLE WORKSTATIONS:
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