[Bioclusters] Any issues porting applications to OS X?

[Elia Stupka]

> 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 
>  :-)

Preamble: performance is to do with good pipelines, networks and people 
and not processors, so I never really look into it
My 2 cents: on the G5 side of things  I don't have serious benchmarks 
for bioinformatics-related stuff though it's running well, but MatLab 
benchmarks give us somethnig like a 30% gain in their 
whatever-benchmark-score on the G5s as compared to 3.somethingGHz  
Xeons

> 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.

Couldn't agree more, Chen Peng, our Xserve guru, loves to run linux on 
his powerbook, but I think it's more along the lines of  the guy that 
developed linux for the iPod, in his FAQ he says Why? Doh, because it 
can run linux! ;)

> Sounds like this product is ideally suited to small to medium sized 
> lab environments with relatively modest compute requirements.

Agree... though I'd say It's just a separate ballgame, even if you do 
have your huge clusters, an Inquiry-G5-out-fhe-box cluster will keep 
your isntitute-type service requirements happy, without messing about 
with your research-oriented large-scale computing needs, of course it's 
more of a nice luxury than a need to have it separate ;)

> 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.

Ah uh, oh you mean that GUI management thing it ships with? I don't 
think we ever touched it on our Xserve cluster ;)

Elia

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