Hi there, I stumbled across this mailing list today searching through some bioperl archives and I'm hoping that someone out there can point me in the right direction to get myself up to speed on bioclusters, both on the hardware and software side. Im more from the bio-side of bioinformatics and Im trying to understand more of the nitty gritty informatics/computer part! We've been writing bioinformatics software in perl/java for a while and we've got Oracle and MySQL databases and we run all the usual genome/sequence analysis packages (blast, blat, etc) plus some of our own annotation pipelines. Historically we've been running these on multiple machines but not really in a cluster with robust load management software or any significant modifications to how we write our code to enable it to scale in a multiprocessor environment. I'm trying to find out better ways to use our Sun, Compaq and (probably) MacOS machines, how to get them all working together to handle both genomic and proteomic analyses and how to modify our existing and new code to work in this environment. I'd love to find some sort of 'bioclustering for dummies' that outlines the usual solutions and approaches, also on the software side something that describes the fundamentals of writing perl and java to exploit clusters and even some simple examples/test packages that I could play with to get my feet wet. A few specific things that Im thinking about, perhaps people can comment on my rationale We have a variety of platforms and it would be great to make them all play together - LSF appears to be a good solution to handle load balancing on a heterogeneous set of servers (we have Sun, Compaq and will probably add Xserves into the mix), from my reading the downside is the price ($400 per server was a price I saw quoted on the list). ease of administration seems to be another pro for LSF which is a big thing as we just want it to work, we dont really want to babysit this stuff - what sort of sysadmin commitment is needed to make this work? Im personally interested in trying the Xserve, the storage capacity, speed, price, etc. all make it attractive as an alternative to our traditional options. Oracle is coming out for OS X (and the developer release is running on my Powerbook as we speak) so that's another good thing. Im doing all my development on a G4 with 10.2 and its great, any thoughts/experiences with using Xserve in the mix with other platforms and Xserve vs intel solutions? Many thanks for any help anyone can give a newbie in the field! Simon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------- Simon Twigger, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Bioinformatics Research Center Medical College of Wisconsin 8701 Watertown Plank Road, Milwaukee, WI, 53226 tel. 414-456-8802, fax 414-456-6595