[Bioclusters] Any issues porting applications to OS X?

[Michael Chute]

A little bit more info:  go to yellowdoglinux.com  This is the Xserve 
with YDL preinstalled.

Mike
Michael D. Chute
BSL-3 Lab Manager
Naval Medical Research Center
Biological Defense Research Directorate
Suite 1N29
503 Robert Grant Ave
Silver Spring, MD 20910
Voice: 301-319-7529
Fax: 301-319-7513
On Mar 5, 2004, at 10:41 AM, Tim Cutts wrote:

>
> On 5 Mar 2004, at 15:32, Christopher Porter wrote:
>
>>
>> We're in the market for a cluster; most of our options are 
>> Xeon/Linux, but one is a cluster of XServe G5s running OS X. We're 
>> going to run some benchmarks to see how the performance compares, but 
>> some in of our group have expressed concern that 'the vast majority 
>> bioinformatics software is developed on Linux', and 'there may be a 
>> long time lag before new software is available on OS X'.
>
> Most stuff compiles quite cleanly.  You could get bitten though with 
> anything that builds shared libraries.  OS X dylib bundles are *very* 
> different from normal UNIX shared objects.  Have a look at the 
> O'Reilly book "MacOS X for Unix Geeks" which is very small, but covers 
> some of this stuff.
>
> There are various other gotchas as well, but I don't know about them 
> in detail.
>
>> I have never had problems getting software I need to run on OS X, but 
>> I wondered if anyone can provide me with examples of applications 
>> that won't run on OS X, or are Linux only (only binaries released & 
>> no source available).
>
> I suspect you'll get much more bang-per-buck with Xeon machines.  
> You'll also probably get better management features, although how 
> crucial that is rather depends on how large a cluster you want to get.
>
> Personally, although I love Macs, and have one as my day-to-day 
> machine, I'm currently happier with Linux for the larger scale stuff.
>
> Tim
>
> -- 
> Dr Tim Cutts
> Informatics Systems Group
> Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
> Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK
>
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