[Bioclusters] Workstation Selection for Bioinformatics Research

Thu, 10 Apr 2003 14:22:21 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Chris Dagdigian wrote:

> I lean in favor of the dual-booting Intel workstations. The scientific
> software developers and bioinformatics researchers will like Linux
> because of the development environment and wide variety of algorithims
> and tool suites. The researchers interested in visualization and data
> mining will also like Linux but they can benefit from Windows as well
> when/if they want to run apps like Spotfire which are Windows-only.

x86 based workstations are a very good thing indeed.  Rather than a
dual-boot configuration, I would seriously suggest looking at straight
linux workstation with a VMWare install to provide access to software that
only runs on Windows.  It's not cheap, but not having to interrupt working
on a linux process to run a scifinder search is a very good thing in my
book.

> You need to be careful with your hardware selection if you expect to do
> serious visualization work on your workstations. Make sure that whatever
> graphics card / monitor combination you get is _well_ supported by the
> X11/Linux distro you plan to use. It may be worth aquiring a test
> machine before you actually commit dollars to a bigger purchase. It is
> probably also worthwhile to try to find people who are currently using
> any workstation combo you plan to aquire to see what real users think.

I'll go way out on a limb here and say that if you are going to want to do
serious visualization under Linux, you will want a NVidia video card.  I
know that free-software purists will object to their binary-only drivers,
but I have been using them on this box for 6 months now without a hitch,
and it has run much faster than anything that uses DRI (like the Radeon),
and the glx support has been far more robust than a radeon or with the
intel chipsets.  Not the cheapest solution, but one that you probably
won't regret either.

> Dell tends to be not that great with Linux at the presales / tech
> support level (sometimes I get lucky) but their Linux guru's hang out on
> the dell-poweredge mailing list and have been amazingly helpful with
> supporting Linux across the entire Dell server line. As an example,
> check out Matt Domsch's website at http://www.domsch.com/linux/ -- that
> site is the first place I check when I'm cluster building with Dell
> PowerEdge boxes.

I'm using a Dell 530 Workstation myself.  Workstation presales linux
support is pretty spotty at Dell, and if you want RedHat pre-installed,
they will be very restrictive about your hardware choices.  I finally just
ordered a better system with XP preinstalled, and when I got the system
I was able to boot the install CDs for Linux, and everything worked,
cleanly.  I can't vouch for on-board modem support, but I didn't have any
hardware support issues, and this was under a non-RedHat distro.  Great
hardware, even if you have to eat the cost of a XP license to get it.

Hope this helps,
		Andy