> In my hands, 2.8 GHz Pentium IV Xeon matches a 1.7 GHz POWER4+ (the > G5's big brother) at almost every genomics code I've thrown at it, so > I'll believe you when I see some numbers, and not from Apple's website > :-) Preamble: performance is to do with good pipelines, networks and people and not processors, so I never really look into it My 2 cents: on the G5 side of things I don't have serious benchmarks for bioinformatics-related stuff though it's running well, but MatLab benchmarks give us somethnig like a 30% gain in their whatever-benchmark-score on the G5s as compared to 3.somethingGHz Xeons > I had thought of mentioning that, but there's almost no commercial > support for Linux on PPC by independent software vendors. It seems a > little pointless to me - if you're going to run Linux, you might as > well run it on the best supported platform, which is still x86. Couldn't agree more, Chen Peng, our Xserve guru, loves to run linux on his powerbook, but I think it's more along the lines of the guy that developed linux for the iPod, in his FAQ he says Why? Doh, because it can run linux! ;) > Sounds like this product is ideally suited to small to medium sized > lab environments with relatively modest compute requirements. Agree... though I'd say It's just a separate ballgame, even if you do have your huge clusters, an Inquiry-G5-out-fhe-box cluster will keep your isntitute-type service requirements happy, without messing about with your research-oriented large-scale computing needs, of course it's more of a nice luxury than a need to have it separate ;) > I'd like to hear more, because I don't believe it. Can you power > cycle a crashed node remotely? What sort of remote console do you > have? Can you do everything you need to through a command line as > well as a GUI? I know GUIs are friendly, but when your cluster gets > large you get tired of clicking buttons *really* quickly. Your > requirements are probably different from mine, though. Ah uh, oh you mean that GUI management thing it ships with? I don't think we ever touched it on our Xserve cluster ;) Elia --- Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine Via Pietro Castellino, 111 80131 Napoli Tel. +39 081 6132 335 Fax. +39 081 6132 351