General system requirements and recommendations

This topic specifies the minimum hardware configurations required by Discovery Studio and the operating systems on which Discovery Studio is supported. In general, the better the hardware configuration of your computer, the better your experience with Discovery Studio will be.

To achieve a more satisfying experience with Discovery Studio, particularly in terms of the client software, it is highly recommended that your system be substantially better than the minimum requirements specified in the following sections. This is particularly true if running server software locally on the same system as the client software.

Attention to the following areas can make a significant improvement to your overall user experience and enjoyment of the software:

• Memory - the more RAM your computer has, the better.
• CPU speed - the faster, the better.
• A high quality OpenGL graphics card can make a significant difference to the graphics performance.
• The higher the display resolution, the more flexibility you have in displaying and managing document and dialog windows.
• Mouse - although not absolutely necessary, a three-button mouse or a two-button mouse with a wheel is strongly recommended. Such a mouse facilitates the manipulation of many of the views used in Discovery Studio.

For example, a PC with 512 MB RAM, a CPU speed of 2 GHz and a workstation-class OpenGL graphics card should give good performance. PC hardware capabilities are currently advancing so rapidly that a new commodity desktop PC would have significantly higher specifications than these.

Windows client system requirements

Hardware minimum

Ensure that the system onto which you install Discovery Studio meets these minimum requirements:

• 32-bit Intel^® Pentium^® 4 or compatible processor running at 2 GHz or greater
• 512 MB RAM
• Graphics card: NVIDIA^® Quadro™ FX 1100, FX1400, FX540 or ATI^® FireGL™ V3200, V5100
• Disk space: 300 MB for client components
• A DVD-ROM drive

Note. The total hard disk space required for installation can vary between 300 MB and 2 GB, depending on the components selected for installation. Additional space is required if system updates are necessary.

Operating systems

The client is supported on workstations running:

• Windows^® 2000 Professional, SP4 Rollup 1
• Windows^® XP Professional, SP1 and SP2

Note. Discovery Studio does not support the x64 Edition of Windows XP Professional.

Additional software required

• Graphics drivers - Discovery Studio is optimized to provide hardware-accelerated graphics with supported NVIDIA and ATI hardware when certified drivers are installed. For example, on Windows, Accelrys recommends version 81.67 or higher for use on NVIDIA Quadro systems. 3D stereo support is also available with hardware that provides quad-buffered OpenGL stereo capabilities. Further details on Accelrys-certified graphics drivers can be obtained from http://www.nvidia.com and http://www.ati.com.

Note. You may wish to upgrade your Adobe Reader 5.1 or higher, since you may otherwise experience problems opening PDF files while Discovery Studio is running.

Windows server system requirements

Hardware minimum

Ensure that the system onto which you install the Discovery Studio server meets these minimum requirements:

• 32-bit Intel^® Pentium^® 4 or compatible processor running at 2 GHz or greater
• 512 MB RAM
• Disk space: 1 GB for Pipeline Pilot plus 450 MB for server components
• A DVD-ROM drive

Note. The hard disk space required for installation can vary between 300 MB and 2 GB, depending on the components selected for installation.

Operating system

The server is supported on workstations running:

• Windows^® 2000 Professional or Server Editions, SP4 Rollup 1
• Windows^® XP Professional, SP1 and SP2
• Windows^® 2003 Server, SP1

Note. Discovery Studio does not support the x64 Edition of Windows XP Professional or Windows 2003 Server.

Linux client system requirements

Hardware minimum

Ensure that the system onto which you install the Discovery Studio client meets these minimum requirements:

• 32-bit Intel^® Pentium^® 4 or compatible processor running at 2 GHz or greater
• 512 MB RAM
• Graphics card: NVIDIA^® Quadro™ FX 1100, FX1400, FX540 or ATI FireGL™ V3200, V5100
• Disk space: 350 MB for client components
• A DVD-ROM drive

Note. The total hard disk space required for installation can vary between 350 MB and 2 GB, depending on the components selected for installation. Additional space is required if system updates are necessary.

Operating system

The client is supported on workstations running:

• Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux WS 3.0, updates 4-7
• Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux WS 4.0, base and updates 1-3

Note. Discovery Studio is designed for use on 32-bit operating systems only. It does not support 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise running natively on Intel^® Itanium^®, Intel^® EM64T, or AMD64.

Additional software required

• GNOME Desktop - Discovery Studio optimized for the GNOME Desktop. We recommend that this software is installed and configured. It should be available on your Linux distribution media.
• System libraries - On Red Enterprise Linux WS 4.0, the Standard C++ libraries for backwards compatibility (compat-libstdc++-33) are required for correct operation of the Discovery Studio client. These are typically provided in a default installation of the operating system.
• Graphics Drivers - Discovery Studio is optimized to provide hardware-accelerated graphics with supported NVIDIA and ATI hardware when certified drivers are installed. For example, on Linux, Accelrys recommends version 1.0-8174 or higher for use on NVIDIA Quadro systems. 3D stereo support is also available with hardware that provides quad-buffered OpenGL stereo capabilities. Further details on Accelrys-certified graphics drivers can be obtained from http://www.nvidia.com and http://www.ati.com.

Linux server system requirements

Hardware requirements

Ensure that the system onto which you install Discovery Studio meets these minimum requirements:

• 32-bit Intel-compatible processor running at 2 GHz or greater
• 512 MB RAM
• Disk space: 2.5 GB for Pipeline Pilot server plus components
• A DVD-ROM drive

Note. The hard disk space required for installation can vary between 300 MB and 2.6 GB (total), depending on the components selected for installation.

Operating system

The server is supported on workstations running:

• Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux WS 3.0, updates 4-7
• Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux WS 4.0, base and update 1-3

Note. Discovery Studio is designed for use on 32-bit operating systems only. It does not support 64-bit versions of Red Hat^® Enterprise running natively on Intel^® Itanium^®, Intel EM64T, or AMD64.

Additional software required

• System libraries - On Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux 4.0, the Standard C++ libraries for backwards compatibility (compat-libstdc++-33) are required for correct operation of the Discovery Studio server. These are typically provided in a default installation of the operating system.
• MPICH - Discovery Studio includes a version of CHARMm that runs on systems with multiple processors. To use this version, MPICH must be installed and configured. We recommend building MPICH 1.2.7 from http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi/mpich1/ using GCC 3.2.3 for C/C++ and Intel 8.1 for Fortran.

Further information

Installing Discovery Studio on Linux systems
Installing Discovery Studio on Windows systems
Removing Discovery Studio