Hardware requirements for GRASS 7

Question

I need to know the minimum hardware requirements to run GRASS 7, at the request of a Journal editor. There is plenty of information in the Wiki about software requirements, but none on hardware.

All I could find is this unsigned message from 20 years ago at GisLounge:

8 Mbytes of memory (of course, more is better..)

100 Mbytes of free disk space

~40 mb for executables,

~40 mb for source code (which you can ignore if you merely install the Linux binaries)

~? for data (the veritable bottomless pit can be filled with data, if you so choose)

Naturally, things might be a little different by now.

Answer 1

This is a digest of a discussion that took place at the GRASS users mail list:

• GRASS should run on any 32-bit CPU. It likely runs on 16-bit CPUs too, but that is something no one has tried in many years.

• It is not known for sure the minimum RAM requirements, but users report successfully running the GRASS console on systems with as low as 256 MB of RAM.

• For actual processing RAM requirements are mostly a function of the size of input maps. However, many modules can be run using a low RAM set up, by configuring the GRASS_VECTOR_LOWMEM environment variable.

Answer 2

This link includes details about the hardware requirements to compile GRASS 7.2, which includes:

• 800 MB of free disk space.

• The source code package needs disk space of around 26 MB compressed and 440MB uncompressed.

• The resulting binaries may need between 20 MB and 180 MB depending on your platform and compiler flags.

• During a full compilation you may need temporarily up to 550MB including the source code.