Clarification on MSA server RAM requirements

[puddleglum56]

Hello! We are looking at implementing the MSA server in-house for fast MSAs. The wiki states that a machine with 2TB RAM is recommended to store the pre-computed indexes in memory, whereas the README indicates that the MSA databases take up to 1TB RAM. Additionally the ColabFold paper states that a 768GB RAM server was used for MSAs.

My understanding is that the 2TB RAM configuration stores the indexes in memory, and is thus faster, whereas the 1TB RAM configuration stores the un-indexed databases in memory and computes the indexes on-the-fly? Could you give more clarity as far as the RAM requirements so that we can spec out an internal server?

Thank you!