Hi list, I am in charge of the setup of a new bioinformatics lab in my university. However, I am wondering what would be the best for my current budget for the high-performance machine, that will do basically genome assemblies, gene finding and homology searches for at least 3 metagenomics projects (but it is probably that it will be used for other applications, like molecular dynamics). For this machine specifically I have about 23 000 US$ and my first though was to build a cluster (which at current local prices could give me a 32 node diskless beowulf with E4400 chips or 16 nodes with Q6600 chips). However, I saw some pretty good SMP machines (with a max of 8 dual core opterons), for about the same price. Taking off the fun of building the cluster, the relative easier administration of a SMP machine and their more general purpose application could justify their choose over a cluster? Even with 48 more cores, could the network be a serious bottleneck in comparison with the SMP machine? Does gigabit port trunking could be a solution for the network bottleneck? I am not in a hurry for this machine, so the time of building the cluster can be discarded. Thanks in advance. Regards, Marcos