On 5 Mar 2004, at 15:32, Christopher Porter wrote: > > We're in the market for a cluster; most of our options are Xeon/Linux, > but one is a cluster of XServe G5s running OS X. We're going to run > some benchmarks to see how the performance compares, but some in of > our group have expressed concern that 'the vast majority > bioinformatics software is developed on Linux', and 'there may be a > long time lag before new software is available on OS X'. Most stuff compiles quite cleanly. You could get bitten though with anything that builds shared libraries. OS X dylib bundles are *very* different from normal UNIX shared objects. Have a look at the O'Reilly book "MacOS X for Unix Geeks" which is very small, but covers some of this stuff. There are various other gotchas as well, but I don't know about them in detail. > I have never had problems getting software I need to run on OS X, but > I wondered if anyone can provide me with examples of applications that > won't run on OS X, or are Linux only (only binaries released & no > source available). I suspect you'll get much more bang-per-buck with Xeon machines. You'll also probably get better management features, although how crucial that is rather depends on how large a cluster you want to get. Personally, although I love Macs, and have one as my day-to-day machine, I'm currently happier with Linux for the larger scale stuff. Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK