Even though any machine can run the GNAT toolset and GNAT Studio IDE, to get the best experience we recommend using a machine with as many cores as possible, allowing individual compilations to run in parallel. A comfortable setup for a compiler server is a machine with 24 physical cores or more, with at least 48 GB of memory (2 GB per core).
For a desktop machine, we recommend a minimum of 4 cores (8 is preferred), with at least 2GB per core (so 8 to 16GB).
In addition, for running and smoothly navigating sources in GNAT Studio, we recommend at least 1.5 GB, plus 3 GB of RAM per million source lines of code. So we recommend at least 3 GB for 500K lines of code and 7.5 GB for 2 million lines of code.
Using fast, local drives can make a significant difference in build
and link times. You should avoid network drives such as NFS, SMB, or
worse, configuration management filesystems (such as ClearCase dynamic
views) as much as possible since these will produce very degraded
performance (typically 2 to 3 times slower than on fast, local
drives). If you cannot avoid using such slow drives for accessing
source code, you should at least configure your project file so
the result of the compilation is stored on a drive local to the
machine performing the compilation. You can do this by setting the
Object_Dir project file attribute.