Minimum System Requirements

Windows®
Windows NT, 2000, XP, XP64, or Vista
Intel® Pentium® III processor or higher
512MB RAM

Linux®
Intel Pentium III processor or higher
Linux 32-bit
512MB RAM

Macintosh®
Mac OS X 10.4.x
Power PC G4 & G5, Intel processors
512MB RAM

Recommendations for Whole Genome Analysis

The amount of data you can analyze is essentially limited by the amount of RAM on your computer. The larger the dataset the more RAM you'll need. For standard whole genome SNP analysis we recommend at least 1GB of RAM as well as a Pentium^® 4 processor or higher and an 80GB hard drive.

Recommendations for Very Large Datasets

We've successfully tested the software with 10,000 individuals genotyped on the Affymetrix 500K array set using a Dell Precision^™ computer with 8GB of RAM, a 2.66 GHZ processor, and running Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. The 500K array is unique in that it requires two file sets (NSP and STY) and actually takes more memory to process than either the Affymetrix 5.0 or 6.0 array set or Illumina 1M.

The following formula can be applied to determine how much RAM you need to analyze these larger SNP arrays:

(number of individuals X number of SNPs)/4

This will give you the number in bytes. 1,000 bytes = 1KB and 1,000 KB = 1MB and 1,000 MB = 1 GB

For 10,000 individuals genotyped on the Affymetrix 6.0 array it would be:

(10,000 X 906,600)/4 = ~2.3 GB

Note: By default, 32-bit Windows versions only allow applications to run in a 2GB memory space. Applications that attempt to use more than this 2GB limit will crash. When working with very large data sets, it may no longer be possible to fit the required data into the default memory space supplied by Windows.

Click here to learn how you can allow up to 3GB of memory usage under 32-bit Windows and 4GB under 64-bit windows.