[Bioclusters] Clusters for bioinformatics... Some numbers or statistics?

[jfreeman]

Hi Ivo,

Ivo Grosse wrote:
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> thanks a lot for your great and detailed email.  We have come to almost
> the same conclusions, in particular to
> 
> >   o life science clusters tend to be used to bulk process many totally
> > independent "embarrassingly parallel" jobs
> >   o little if any use of parallel applications for sequence analysis
> 
> Hence, I would like to ask the following provocative question to you
> and the list:
> 
> What is the advantage of a beowulf cluster over, say, a network of
> workstations on which PBS (or any other batch system) is running?

A beowulf cluster can have a batch system on it, so in that way there is
no difference.

A cluster of client workstations, using the clients idle cycles, works
great until your thesis / CFO's budget / experimental results get
destroyed by an errant batch process. If you have no clients on these
workstations then you are back to a cluster again.

That's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Jim 
> Ivo
> 
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