System Requirements
System Requirements
Software
- Microsoft Windows 8.1, 64 bit, Windows 10, 64 bit, or Windows 11, 64 bit
- Ubuntu 18.04 64 bit (or compatible OS), or CentOS Linux 7 64 bit (deprecated support, to be discontinued) only for physics kernels
- Sim4Life runs smoothly and fast on Mac OSX via VMWare or Parallels
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or higher
- Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
- Administration rights are required for installation
Minimum Hardware
- Minimum 8 GB RAM. Depending on the size of the models and the results desired, the memory requirements may be higher. An amount of 16 GB is definitely recommended. However, certain applications may include more than 40 million voxels and thus require more than 16 GB of RAM.
- 12 GB hard disk space for the application, 2.5 GB for the user manual and sample projects. 15 GB additional temporary hard disk space required during the installation process only.
- A graphics adapter with adequate OpenGL performance, capable of displaying a resolution of 1280 × 1024 pixels or better (optimum size: 1920 × 1200 pixels) at 32-bit color depth. Graphics driver with support at least for OpenGL v2.0 (recommended OpenGL 4.0 or later).
Recommended Hardware
- 8 GB of RAM if no hardware acceleration is used. At least the same amount of RAM as in the NVIDIA GPU installed for computation, twice as much is recommended. Memory size is also highly dependent on the size of your models and the dimension of your sensors.
- 1 TB hard disk space to include working projects and calculated results
- Power supply: at least 1kW for a 1 GPU solution
- PCIe x16
GPU Cards
- For the CUDA-based solvers (CUDA P-EM-FDTD, P-THERMAL, P-ACOUSTICS), Sim4Life supports NVIDIA GPU models equipped with CUDA compute capability 3.5 up to 8.6, and requires device drivers that support the CUDA toolkit 11.0 and above. Note that NVIDIA may choose to discontinue certain drivers for specific operating systems, e.g., CUDA 11.0 drivers may not be available for Windows 8.1 for certain GPU series. In such a case, an update to Windows 10 or 11 may permit further usage of the GPU with Sim4Life.
