Choosing a computer for SDT

SDT will run on any computer and operating system where MATLAB runs fine. The selection should really be based on your intended use of SDT.

FEM simulation may require the use of a 64 bit machine. Memory segmentation typically causes 32 bit MATLAB operation to fail much before all the memory is actually used. As a result using a 64 bit machine with even modest amounts of RAM (below 2 GB) will typically run much better than a large 32 bit machine. For users intending to run computation with more than a 100,000 DOF, it is safer to use a 64 bit OS.
For Experimental modal analysis, windows may be preferrable since most of the data acquisition is done under that OS. No other requirement.
FEM pre-/post processing using FEMLink typically does not require a large computer since FEMLink is written to support out-of-core operations (operations that keep the data in files until it is needed).
To view large FEM models it is desirable to use a decent graphics card (one recommended for use with CAD/CAM software, that explicitly supports OpenGL and has a good memory).
For intensive computations with database calls, a RAID0 or RAID5 disk array is often quite useful.
SDT and the MATLAB libraries called by SDT, do not currently make a major use of multi-threading. The target machine for intensive FEM computations on very large models would thus currently be a 2 processor 4 core linux machine with 16 GB memory and an RAID array of 1 TB of disk.