[Bioclusters] Need some advice on a cluster for EST/cDNA assembly, clustering

[Aaron Darling]

Dr D.S-M. Huen wrote:

> On Feb 28 2005, Matthew Hudson wrote:
>
>>
>> Another key consideration is: How much sysadmin experience / effort 
>> does this life science group have? Maintaining and updating a Linux 
>> cluster built from scratch can be a challenge for a group of biology 
>> PhDs with no full-time sysadmin, not to mention the cost of power 
>> consumtion, cooling etc.. Sun is a little better than building your 
>> own Linux system, Apple really try to make this easier and might be a 
>> better solution, but their cluster software is expensive. If it's 
>> just an EST project you might recommend they get one or two good size 
>> SMP machines (maybe the new quad Opterons from Sun, with at least 8GB 
>> RAM) and forget about the cluster.
>>
>
> I must admit I am considering whether I should aim to use something 
> like Sun's Compute Grid service in future ($1/ CPU-hr). The overhead 
> of sysadmin plus the need to find secure space for machines in a 
> crowded lab is not one to be relished. Lab space is incredibly 
> expensive too, not only to build and maintain but also because the 
> space occupied by machines is space that could otherwise house one or 
> more grant-generating postdocs :-)
>
Perhaps you need one of these:

http://www.orionmulti.com/

Apparently they sell a version with bioinformatics apps like Bioteam's 
iNquiry pre-installed.  I've been dreaming of having 96 processors under 
my desk ever since I heard about them.

-Aaron