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Gears
Gears are executable programs installed in the Flywheel site. Typically, these are programs that are of interest to many users. The installation is usually managed by Flywheel itself or by the site manager. You can see the set of Gears installed at your site by clicking on 'Gears installed' on the left panel of the Flywheel web page.
Gears are implemented using a low-overhead virtual machine called a Docker container. This makes the Gears portable across systems. If you hear about a Gear at a site other than your own, you can ask for it to be installed. If you know of a program that you think many people would like to have installed as a Gear, you can ask your site manager.
There is continuing growth in the number of Gears and what they do. For the Lab Edition of Flywheel, where many users share a central resource, the ability to run Gears is usually restricted to programs that have modest computational demands and are used by many users. Computationally demanding Gears that are used for specialized purposes are typically installed and run on the Lab Edition so that the costs of computation and memory can be assigned.
An example of an important utility used by many people is dcm2niix by Chris Rorden and his colleagues. This important utility converts DICOM files to the NIfTI files that many people use in their data analysis. Flywheel sites typically have a Gear that can be run automatically to convert DICOM files. This is a 'Utility Gear'.
Another important program is FreeSurfer, by Bruce Fischl and his colleagues. This is a tool that performs many analyses of T1 anatomical files. If you obtain permission from the MGH group, you can run this 'Analysis Gear' on a Flywheel site.
Some advantages of running Gears within Flywheel is that (a) you do not have to download and install the program itself, (b) the version and time when you ran the program is archived on the site itself, and (c) the outputs of the program are stored on the site either adjacent to the data (Utility Gear) or in an Analysis page (Analysis Gear), and (d) the Flywheel engine (Lab Edition) supports running multiple copies of Analysis Gears.