[Bioclusters] Workstation Selection for Bioinformatics Research

[Duzlevski, Ognen]

Hi Dr. Wicks,

can you elaborate on the price tradeoffs? How many more PCs would you get
for a number of Macs? I am not anti-Mac, just curious to know what is an
actual benefit in even thinking about Macs in a cluster.

Thank you,
Ognen

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Stephen Wicks wrote:

> Hi Chip,
>
> Whenever I see someone considering a Linux/Windows dual boot setup for
> a single job in biology, I recommend that they consider a Macintosh.
> OSX will give you fully supported access to all of the command line or
> X11 apps that you will need (including in your case RasMol, Povray,
> Molscript, raster3d etc.), and still let your users use
> Office/Photoshop etc. at the same time on the same machine and same OS.
> Networking and interoperability these days is a non-issue. The only
> caveat right now might be that the G4 towers are fast, but not as fast
> as the top end Intel-based solution.
>
> You wanted options...
>
> Stephen
>
> Dr. Stephen Wicks,
> Assistant Professor, Biology.
> Boston College.
> 140 Commonwealth Ave.,
> Chestnut Hill, MA. 02467.
>
> Phone: 617 552 6851 (office)
> Fax: 617 552 2011
> Office: Rm 468 Higgins Hall
> e-mail: swicks@bc.edu
>
>
> On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 12:39 PM, Chip Coward wrote:
>
> > Greetings,
> >
> >     I am a researcher in bioinformatics at Drexel University and we are
> > setting up a computational lab for research and teaching in
> > Computational
> > Systems Biology/Bioinformatics. We are looking for workstations for
> > our lab
> > using existing software tools or developing new tools to perform
> > molecular
> > modeling/visualization (e.g. RasMol/Protein Explorer), searching the
> > genome,
> > stochastic modelling/cellular automata, ect. We are considering both
> > SUN
> > workstations and Dell workstations (Precision 450/Precision 650)
> > although we
> > would be open to consider other platforms if there are compelling
> > reasons. I
> > am writing to get input/information that will help us make a decision
> > on
> > platform selection. I am leaning toward selecting the Dell Workstation
> > due
> > to the theme that prevades these email lists about use of Linux which
> > seems
> > to be the way the bioinformatics community is heading. If we purchased
> > the
> > Dell system I would configure it to support both Windows and Linux
> > under the
> > assumption that by supporting both operating systems, we would have
> > more
> > options/flexibility for tool selection.
> >
> >    I would appreciate any thoughts or opinions that would help in our
> > platform selection.
> >
> >    Thanks.
> >
> >          Chip Coward
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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