[Bioclusters] BLAST/ PBS / Grid Engine

[Goran Ceric]

> I'm not partial to the current blade servers because many of them (like
>  the RLX system I played with 6 months ago) end up using cheezy 4200
> RPM  laptop disk drives as the main OS disk. Cheezy laptop drives are
> simply  not fast enough to deal with the large number of IO-bound
> applications  that bio people typically run. In particular I'd hate to
> run BLAST on  one of them.

I agree with you. Most vendors seem to be going with low-power low-speed 
CPUs/drives in their blade servers suited more for web server farms than 
HPC. I guess because of the cooling issues etc. Dell is supposed to be 
coming out with these 
http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topics/esg_pedge_rackmain_servers_1_pedge_1655
mc.htm some time soon. Maybe it's not the density one would want, but it's 
definitely a full-power computer. 

Goran Ceric
System Administrator
Washington University St. Louis
Department of Genetics, Eddy Lab
goran@genetics.wustl.edu