System requirements

Prerequisites overview

Each component of the OMERO platform has a separate set of prerequisites. Where possible, we provide tips on getting started with each of these technologies, but we can only provide free support within limits.

Package	OMERO.server	Java	Python	Ice	PostgreSQL
OMERO.importer	Required	Required
OMERO.insight	Required	Required
OMERO.editor	Required for some functionality	Required
OMERO.server		Required	Required	Required	Required
OMERO.web	Required		Required	Required
OMERO.py	Required for some functionality		Required	Required
OMERO.cpp	Required for some functionality			Required

OMERO.server

The system requirements for OMERO.server vary greatly depending on image size and number of users. At a minimum we suggest:

• Ubuntu 10.04 or later / CentOS 6 / Debian 6 (squeeze) or other Linux distribution; Mac OS X 10.8 or later; Windows Vista or later
• Single core 1.33GHz Intel or AMD CPU
• 2GB RAM
• 500MB of hard drive space for OMERO.server distribution
• Java 1.6 or later
• Python 2 (2.6.5 or later)
• Hard drive space proportional to the image sizes expected. The drive space should permit proper locking, which is often not the case with remotely mounted shares. See the Unix and Windows binary repository sections for more information.

The recommended OMERO.server specification we suggest for between 25-50 users is:

• Ubuntu 12.04 or later / CentOS 6 / Debian 7 (wheezy) or other Linux distribution; Mac OS X 10.8 or later; Windows Server 2008
• Quad core 1.33GHz Intel or AMD CPU
• 8GB RAM
• 500MB hard drive space for OMERO.server distribution
• Java 1.6 or later
• Python 2 (2.6.5 or later)
• Hard drive space proportional to the image sizes expected (Likely between 10 and 100TB)

RAM is not going to scale linearly, particularly with the way the JVM works. You are probably going to hit a hard ceiling between 4 and 6GB for JVM size (there is really not much point in having it larger anyway). With a large database and aggressive PostgreSQL caching your RAM usage could be larger. Still, even for a large deployment, it is not cost effective to use more than a few GBs of RAM for this purpose. Performance and monitoring provides information about fine-tuning the server processes’ memory usage.

Summary: Depending on hardware layout 16, 24 or 32GB of RAM would be ideal for your OMERO server. If you have a separate database server more than 16GB of RAM may not be of much benefit to you at all.

CPU is really not something that an OMERO system is almost ever limited by. However, when it is limited it is almost always limited by GHz and not by the CPU count. So you are not going to get a huge OMERO experience performance increase by, for example, throwing 24 cores at the problem.

Summary: Depending on hardware layout 2 x 4, 2 x 6 system core count should be more than enough.

OMERO.insight, OMERO.editor and OMERO.importer

The recommended client specification is:

• Ubuntu 12.04 or later / CentOS 6 / Debian 7 (wheezy) or other Linux distribution; Mac OS X 10.8 or later; Windows Vista or later
• Single core 1.33GHz Intel or AMD CPU
• 2GB RAM
• 100MB hard drive space for OMERO.clients distribution
• Java 1.6 or later

Large imports may require 4GB RAM.

Client configuration

When performing some operations the clients make use of temporary file storage and log directories. By default these files are stored below the user’s HOME directory in $HOME/omero/tmp, $HOME/omero/log, and $HOME/omero/sessions (resp. $HOME\omero\tmp, $HOME\omero\log, and $HOME\omero\sessions). If your home directory is stored on a network, possibly NFS mounted (or similar), then these temporary files are being written and read over the network. This can slow access down. The OMERO_TEMPDIR environment variable may used to set the directory used for temporary files, for example on fast local storage.