Hello everyone,
our lab currently has a local compute cluster with 2 nodes (24 cores, 128GB ram each) and 3 workstations (8 cores, 32GB each). We wanted to stack up with a few new machines and I have a very basic question: For naturalistic neuroimaging analysis (ISC, IS-RSA, etc.) would you recommend
- buying two machines with 24 cores and 128 GB RAM
- buying one machine with 64 cores and 256GB RAM
My understanding is that two machines are better for embarrassingly parallel problems (e.g., distribtuing multiple subjects when running fMRIprep), and that a single, high-powered machine is better for costly computations (e.g., phase-randomization during ISC). As additional info, we do use SLURM as scheduler.
Many thanks!
Freddy