Technical Requirements (last updated July 2010)

FLACS v9.1r2 is available on Microsoft Windows and on Linux. FLACS v9.1r2 has been tested on the following platforms:

Microsoft Windows:

• Windows XP (32 bit)
• Windews Vista (32 bit)
• Windows 7

Linux distributions:

• OpenSuse 10.0, 10.2, 10.3, 11.0, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3
• CentOS 4.6, 4.8, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5
• Ubuntu 7.10, 8.10, 9.04, 10.04
• Fedora 8, 9, 10, 12, 13

Note that Fedora 11 is not supported.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6, 4.8, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 is expected to be FLACS v9.1r2 compatible since it is compatible with CentOS 4.6, 4.8, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5.

Hardware requirements:

• Processor: Intel or AMD ix86 32 bit, Intel EM64T or AMD64. Intel IA64 is not supported.
• Internal memory; 2GB or more recommended.
• Free harddrive capacity: 350MB for software installation and typically 100GB simulation space.
• Graphics card using NVIDIA chip set. Graphics cards using for instance ATI or Intel chipsets are in general not supported.
• DVD-RW drive recommended.
• High resolution colour screen (minimum 19", 1600x1200, 24 bit color depth). 

Experience when running FLACS v9 on Windows compared to Linux:

• The FLACS v9 program package contains the same family of tools whether you choose to download the version for Windows or the version for Linux. If you are acquainted with Windows, but have no experience with Linux, it is probably best to start with the Windows version of FLACS v9. For an experienced Linux user, ordinary Linux commands (e.g. grep, find, cp, tail) can often be used  in an efficient way when managing many FLACS simulations. When running the pre-processor CASD on Windows, one should make sure that only one person is working at a time on the geometry files considered (to avoid errors and confusion), on Linux it is possible to lock files (thus avoiding that more than one person work at the same time on the same geometry in an uncoordinated way). Further, our experience is that Linux may in some cases be somewhat more robust and efficient when several FLACS tasks demanding large resources (could e.g. be CASD and the core simulator flacs) are running simultaneously on the same computer.
   
• FLACS v9 can be run as a standalone installation on a single computer. FLACS v9 can also be run on several computers in a network. The FLACS license manager can be installed on either a Linux server or a Windows server. And then FLACS can be run on a set of client computers (e.g. some client computers using Windows and some client computers using Linux).

Additional requirements and comments:

• Concerning computers with 64 bit processors: It has been tested internally at GexCon to compile and run FLACS with 64 bit processor on Linux computer. It is at the moment uncertain when a 64 bit compiled Linux version of FLACS is commercially available for our FLACS users. If you select a 64 bit processor, it is strongly recommended that you choose a processor that also is able to run efficiently code compiled for 32 bit. For example AMD produces 64 bit processors that are also able to run code compiled for 32 bit efficiently (AMD64 and Intel EM64T are supported, but Intel IA64 is in general not supported). It is important that the 32 bit version of all necessary libraries coming with the Linux operating system for your 64 bit computer, are installed. In general it is recommended, unless limited disk space is available, to include all available libraries, including 32 bit version, when the Linux operating system is installed on your computer (this seems in our experience to minimize the risk for any problems).

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