Operating Systems

The short answer to the question “which Operating Systems are supported” is that all recent Windows and Mac OS X versions are supported, and many of the popular Linux versions as well. The OS must be a 64bit OS. For more detailed information, read on.

Claro works fine in virtual environments. The performance is comparable with running Claro on physical machines IF the I/O performance is good. Which is not always the case, and also difficult to asses in a virtual environment.

Following Windows versions are officially supported:
Windows Server 2016      10
Windows 10      10
Windows 8.1     6.3
Windows Server 2012 R2     6.3
Windows 8     6.2
Windows Server 2012     6.2
Windows 7     6.1
Windows Server 2008 R2     6.1

Following Macosx versions are officially supported:
Mac OS X  Sierra     10.12.x
Mac OS X  El Capitan     10.11.x
Mac OS X  Yosemite     10.10.x
Mac OS X  Mavericks     10.9.x
Mac OS X  Mountain Lion     10.8.x

Linux has many different flavors, and Claro will run on most of them. We have experience with Red Hat, Suse and Centos flavors. A 64bit Java Runtime Environment, version 7 or higher must be installed.

System requirements, throughput and performance

The short answer is to give you minimum and recommended system requirements. We will do this here. First thing you will notice is that minimum and recommended requirements are far apart. The reason for this is that Claro can be configured to process one, two, three or four images simultaneously. We call this concurrent processes. This means not only the minimum and recommended requirements are far apart, but also the achievable throughput with those requirements. “Recommended” here means “get the maximum performance out of your Claro license”. If you process 100 images per day (and not all at the same time), the minimum requirements are probably sufficient.

Minimum requirements (processing one image at a time):
2 processor-cores, >= 3 Ghz, 4 GB RAM

Recommended requirements (processing 4 images simultaneously):
8 processor cores, >= 3 Ghz, 16 GB RAM

I/O performance
(Disk I/O encompasses the input/output operations on a physical disk)

Not usually found in system requirements, I/O performance can nevertheless be very important for the performance of applications, and indeed it is for Claro. On physical, dedicated machines, this typically is not an issue, although there is a considerable advantage in using SSD drives.
Note: Claro works fine in virtual environments. The performance is comparable with running Claro on physical machines IF the I/O performance is good. Which is not always the case, and also difficult to asses in a virtual environment.
Throughput / performance
Lets start with a some processing times on a macbook pro 13″, with a 2.6 Ghz Intel i5 (thats 2 cores) and 8GB RAM, and an SSD harddrive, using one image process, and all typical features enabled. Keep in mind that you can process up to 4 images simultaneously in a properly dimensioned server. That means that to calculate throughput you can divide the processing time per image by approximately a factor of 3 (since there is a little overhead in processing 4 images simultaneously). In this example configuration, the SSD drive is good, but the processor is hardly suitable with only 2 cores and 2.6 Ghz.
0.5 million-pixel image:  2 sec
6 million-pixel image: 23 sec
18 million-pixel image: 40 sec

Note: As you can see, a big factor in performance is the number of pixels of images. Claro can also resample images. It is the first step in the processing sequence. If you can downsample images based on a known output size and required resolution, the processing will typically be much faster.