On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, 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. > Good choice. Almost all bioinformatics software nowadays have Linux support. And noone can beat GNU/Linux when it comes to software development. And Linux really scale very well to move to cluster computing. It is so easy, one of our Indian distribution actually modified RedHat 8 to give cluster installtion as standard installation option. Except for some legacy proprietary software you can virtually manage to do all your bioinformatics on Linux. Cheers, Malay