We recently obtained a pair of 8-core Mac Pro machines with 16 G of RAM. We have had a 48-node dual-G5 Mac cluster for a couple years. It takes a fair bit of work and understanding of local vs remote file system issues to make the cluster work efficiently. However, we have seen *immediate* increases in productivity for the folks that started using the SMP boxes; the increase in amount of memory and the fact that it is trivial to efficiently use the multiple processors made a world of difference. What we're probably going to do moving forward is make sure we have cycles available on SMP boxes for folks to use, and run our production batch-oriented tasks that we can take the time to optimize for it on the cluster. As far as network goes; we've got 2TB of local disk on each of these machines (3 750G drives), so we have essentially zero network use for the work being done on them at the moment... --bob On Sep 1, 2007, at 2:56 PM, Marcos de Carvalho wrote: > > > 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 > _______________________________________________ > Bioclusters maillist - Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org > https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters >