On 5 Mar 2004, at 15:53, Michael Chute wrote: > For my two cents I would have to disagree with the Xeon approach. A > cluster of Xserves is probley going to give you more speed and storage > for the buck than a Xeon machine. We have a small cluster of Xserves > running osX server and we find that it is very fast, and the new g5 > slusters are even faster. In my hands, 2.8 GHz Pentium IV Xeon matches a 1.7 GHz POWER4+ (the G5's big brother) at almost every genomics code I've thrown at it, so I'll believe you when I see some numbers, and not from Apple's website :-) > Another alternative that has been done in the past is to actually run > Linux on Xserves. I don't know the details of this but I do know that > this has been done. I had thought of mentioning that, but there's almost no commercial support for Linux on PPC by independent software vendors. It seems a little pointless to me - if you're going to run Linux, you might as well run it on the best supported platform, which is still x86. > If you look at the bioteam software as well there are over 200 > bioinformatics tools included with the package and they all have a gui > interface which is very nice for the average user. Sounds like this product is ideally suited to small to medium sized lab environments with relatively modest compute requirements. > As far as management features you can't beat osx server. I'd like to hear more, because I don't believe it. Can you power cycle a crashed node remotely? What sort of remote console do you have? Can you do everything you need to through a command line as well as a GUI? I know GUIs are friendly, but when your cluster gets large you get tired of clicking buttons *really* quickly. Your requirements are probably different from mine, though. > Everything is so easy to do you don't need a bunch of IT people to > do it for you. I am a microbiologist and I admin our cluster. As I said, I guess this depends on scale. I'm part of a team of four that run a cluster of over 1200 machines. They're physically located in a building 500 metres from my office - I really need to be able to do almost anything to them remotely, short of having to physically remove them to change parts, and without having to use a mouse. > I think the "most tools for bioinformatics under linux" is not > exactly true. I don't think you will find much trouble finding an osx > port for most of the tools. FYI there is going to be a webcast about > the Xserve cluster for use in bioinformatics next thursday, you might > want to watch, you might get some of your questions answered. Sounds worth a listen... > http://education.apple.com/webcast/workgroupcluster/ Tim -- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK