I am wondering what resources (number of CPUs, memory) are needed/recommended for ATLAS installation. Would ATLAS take advantage of multiple CPUs?
You could think of ATLAS as 2 parts: the web UI and the backend services. The WebUI part is just hosted on any old HTTP server which only needs to deliver HTML/Javascript to the browser…so not much CPU invovled in that piece.
The backend services are encapsulated into a Java WAR file deployed to your choice of Java hosting environment (we use Tomcat ourselves), and this server should be more beefy. 90% of the work that WebAPI does is just forwarding queries over to a database backend, but there is memory considerations for WebAPI since many of these results are cached. In addition, it is multi threaded, so multiple CPU cores would be good. I’d suggest a server with 16 GB RAM, and a typical 4Ghz quad-core CPU should be plenty to manage the relatively low compute-intensive taks that WebAPI needs to perform (again, it’s mostly issuing queries, processing results, caching results, writing results to the client). Memory is a larger concern with your configuration.
All of this depends on what other loads you are placing on the host. If it is a shared server, you should add more muscle to account for that.
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