Inquiry about hardware requirements

[amber4mint]

Thank you for developing this promising tool!

I noticed that the hardware requirements for running this tool and processing protein data may demand several terabytes of storage. I would appreciate your advice on the recommended hardware specifications, particularly for RAM, storage capacity, the number of GPU/CPU cores and so on, needed to ensure optimal performance.

Thank you for your guidance!

[arneschneuing]

Hello, thanks for this question. I would say disk space and CPU cores are the most important factors for using MaSIF. The neural network is very lightweight, so you won't get significant speedups when using GPUs compared to CPUs. However, we typically parallelize our runs across hundreds or thousands of CPU cores. Moreover, you need a large amount of disk space to save the pre-computed surface meshes and descriptors. The exact amount depends on your database size but it can easily reach $\approx$ 1TB.