[Bioclusters] Platform LSF has some new academic pricing structures

Chris Dagdigian bioclusters@bioinformatics.org
Thu, 07 Nov 2002 22:49:57 -0500


I forgot to mention this and have not heard it much elsewhere...

For academic labs using clusters for non-commmercial work I've seen 
Platform starting to quote subscription-only prices of ~$78 USD per 
linux cpu / per year.

$78 sure beats the standard ~$400/cpu Linux pricing that I've seen and 
is something that should be looked at seriously by the academics here -- 
the cost may be worth it just to get a really nice DRM with exposed APIs 
that is backed by commercial support. Especially as many of the academic 
labs are getting clusters with the goal of being able to run the Ensembl 
genome annotation stuff which has internal dependencies on LSF anyway.

This isn't a sales pitch :) I use and install both GridEngine and LSF. 
(I'm actually doing an SGE-based linux blast farm install right now)

The new academic pricing structure just makes the 'which DRM to choose' 
question a bit harder.

PS- can any LSF 5.0 users out there confirm that Platform is now 
encrypting their event logs and requiring the purchase of an additional 
license just to view {critical} log data? If true this is really nasty.

-chris