Hi Daniel,

I have experience with BOINC, I think it's a great system. I don't think it would be my first choice for processing fMRI data. You could wrap your AFNI commands using the wrapper app. I've used it for single programs, but not for a series of programs called through a shell script (e.g. afni_proc.py). In terms of using computers all over campus, I don't think BOINC is the system to use for information that needs to be kept private. You can read about how the system keeps things unencrypted both in transit and in memory.

If you aren't planning to upgrade to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion anytime soon, I'd say go ahead and use Xgrid or use Condor which works well on 10.6-10.8.x and likely will continue to work in the future. I'm also a big fan of GNU Parallel, which send jobs to other computers and can be setup using Homebrew. Pair it with an NFS share mounted on all computers and you have a fast-made cluster.

GNU Parallel example to skull strip all files in a directory:

ls *.nii | parallel 3dSkullStrip -input {} -prefix {.}_brain.nii

Any cluster system paired with good scripting (e.g. bash, python, ruby, etc) can work. It then just comes down to how much work you want to put in to get it running.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/25/2012 06:19PM by Peter Molfese.