[Eeglablist] How to make an ICA run in less than a week?

[James Desjardins]

Hi James,

The durations that you are talking about sound like swap issues. In  
Linux I use the Conky system monitor to predict when Matlab is going  
to slow "way" down due to swap access.

Does the ICA run significantly faster if you use a PCA reduction (add  
the optional key/val pair 'pca',64 in your call to runica)? With a 10  
minute recording this may be a good idea regardless of the processing  
time.

Are you seeing several "Lowering learning rate to ... and starting  
again" iterations among the first runs?

Is down sampling an option for you?


-- 
James Desjardins, MA
Technician, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab
Department of Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience
Brock University
500 Glenridge Ave.
St. Catharines, ON, Canada
L2S 3A1
905-688-5550 x4676


Quoting James Schaeffer <schaefj3 at gmail.com>:

> Dear eeglablist,
>
> I am running ICAs on 10 minutes of Biosemi EEG data, collected from 128
> channels, and sampled at 2048 Hz. However, the ICAs have been running for a
> few days without much progress. Two computers have 8G RAM and an Intel(R)
> Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz. One has been running an ICA for 6 days and is on step
> 33; the other, for 4 days, and is on step 28. Another computer has 12G RAM
> and an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5110 @ 1.60GHz; it has been running for 3 days
> and is on step 60. All are running openSUSE 12.1 (x86_64), with eeglab
> version 10.2.2.4b. The 'free' command indicates that they are not using any
> swap space.  Should it be taking this long?  Is it possible that we have
> more than the one copy of the data in ram or that Matlab or Eeglab has
> placed something else in ram, or is busy with other processes? Is there
> anything I can do to speed up this process? Any help would be greatly
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> James
>