[Bioclusters] blast on opteron

[Hunter Matthews]

A researcher here is looking for where to host their blast searches. One
question I asked was "how big is this database" and the reply was 4-6GB
total.

I'm no blast expert, but my understanding is that blast is heavily IO
bound. What about buying an opteron with 8GB of ram and simply creating
a 6GB ram disk? That would leave 2GB for the OS and blast itself, and
then the entire IO would be in memory.

Is that insane? The machine I specifically had in mind was a dual CPU
opteron with 8GB of ram and a single disk (for the OS and the
"permanent" copy of the database). Several vendors quoted about $5500
for this machine, which was the researchers target budget anyway.

-- 
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