[Bioclusters] BioITWorld Boston next week - apple-centric stuff

[Chris Dagdigian]

Hi folks,

I'm not enclosing the actual invitation so as to avoid sounding like a 
salesguy but it looks as though Bill from BioTeam will be giving a 
apple/informatics/clustering presentation from 4-4:45pm on March 26th at 
BioITWorld in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center.  Right after the 
talk there will be a wine & cheese reception/gathering in the new Boston 
Apple Market Center which apparently is either attached to the Hynes or 
is really close bye. Email me for details if this is something that may 
be of interest.

For those with expo floor or conference passes look for some of us in 
the Apple booth. We are going to be building a cluster on the show floor 
out of several flavors of Xserve: the original Xserve, the recent 
variant that allows single-button booting off of external firewire 
devices and the latest stripped down "scientific cluster" model that was 
announced a few days ago.

The coolest trick however is going to be showing how we can boot, 
povision and automatically deploy a sun grid engine enabled 
bioinformatics cluster node in just a few minutes with an Apple iPod. 
Yeah we could have used any old external firewire drive but 
bootstrapping cluster nodes via a MP3 player is just more fun.

Apple is also bringing an XRaid chassis to the show (2.5 terabytes of 
fiber attached storage for $11,000...). We've asked the booth people to 
bring along a couple of extra fibre channel HBAs and if we can we are 
going to be lugging a Rackable PIII linux server to the show so we can 
perform some Linux/Xraid interoperability tests on the show floor :)

I'm personally interested in using Xraid in linux clusters either as 
inexpensive network attached /scratch space or possibly as a primary 
fileserver for small to mid-sized clusters if the performance hold up. 
We'll see I guess.

-Chris