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Table of Contents
Computer Requirements
Acquisition
The main constraints is sufficiently fast disk write speed to handle the camera data. Worst-case is 100 fps with full frame, or 800 MB/s (only one camera is used at a time). Usually this is solved by using SSDs in RAID0 configuration (e.g. 4 SSDs in RAID0 can achieve >1 GB/s). If you aren't using full frame or fastest imaging speed this requirement is relaxed.
Data Analysis
Having lots of RAM speeds the analysis; ideally the entire dataset can be held in active memory. Ideally get a computer with CUDA-capable graphics card because some of the data analysis software can take advantage of it to speed the computation (OpenCL is a competing framework for GPU computation). This is a nascent area and depends on software support; many developments in computation/data analysis are forthcoming so it's hard to say exactly what will be the best hardware in the long run.
Specific suggestions
ASI has successfully used Dell Precision T3600 with 8-core Xeon CPU, 4x SSDs in RAID0, 64 GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro K4200, and enough PCIe slots (2 camera framegrabber cards, graphics card, and RAID controller).
