psom_heartbeat on matlab and windows

[pbellec]

actually psom_heartbeat is using the command kill which is not available in matlab :/ It already defaults to a system call if the command does not exist, but this will not work on windows. There may be hope using Taskkill....
http://tweaks.com/windows/39559/kill-processes-from-command-prompt/

[pbellec]

even more fun... psom_heartbeat actually uses kill(pid,0); to check that the main process is still alive. Need to find an equivalent for Windows. Or, alternatively, drop that part of the heartbeat on windows. This functionality really is critical on distributed systems, not so much on a single workstation, which will be the use case with windows.

[surchs]

With the docker release system and possibly some HPC users, are we actually determined to support Windows and MacOS? I mean docker doesn't work flawlessly on these systems but this may change soon.

[pbellec]

The plan for PSOM is to have no dependencies, be relatively small and work on Matlab/Octave x (LINUX/OSX/Windows), anywhere from a laptop to a supercomputer. It worked for PSOM 1.0, hopefully we will be able to pull it out for PSOM 2.0.

Note that these requirements are separate from NIAK, which has much heavier dependencies and cannot be supported everywhere. FYI, new docker for Windows and OSX will be released in June. We'll see how it goes for NIAK with that. In any case I would like for the NIAK core (reader/writer/visualizer) to work on all platforms. People would run the pipelines through docker (without a GUI), and then explore interactively their results with NIAK (but without any dependencies installed). This means getting a minc reader/writer that does not depend on the minc tools.