Re: Question about hardware

Posted by Jeff Brandenburg on Apr 05, 2007; 2:13pm
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/Question-about-hardware-tp3699843p3699846.html

I haven't done much with Windows, but on OS X, I can't detect any
difference between dual-processor and dual-core behavior.

Most (all?) ImageJ operations are single-threaded, but multiple
cores/processors allow you to perform some of these operations in
parallel.  Someone else mentioned opening multiple files at once; I
think I've operated on one image while performing a lengthy reslice
operation in another window.

Long ago, I hacked up a multithreaded version of the reslice operator,
and saw near-linear speedup from one to four cores on a quad G5.  
Contemporary ImageJ versions reslice much more efficiently, and I'm not
sure I'd see a similar speedup if I repeated this feat, but I still
hope to revisit it at some point.  We do a lot of work with large
stacks, and there are a lot of stack operations that operate on each
slice independently and sequentially.  Such operations are
"embarrassingly parallel", and should benefit greatly from
multithreading.

On Apr 2, 2007, at 11:40 AM, audrey karperien wrote:

> Hi all.  I realize this may be against the law, but I use ImageJ on a
> PC, pentium 4, 2.6 GHz, 1 gig o' ram.   I need to upgrade, too.  I've
> read that some programs run slower, some faster on dual processors,
> but that dual cores are different.  Anybody have experience running
> imageJ on dual something or other PCs?
--
        -jeffB (Jeff Brandenburg, Duke Center for In-Vivo Microscopy)