[Bioclusters] Any issues porting applications to OS X?

[Philip MacMenamin]

One thing that may or may not have an effect on your decision:

In our case, we have a load of G4s hanging around the lab for various 
purposes. With Apples XGrid, its very easy to just get these to add 
themselves to the cluster as soon as the screensaver runs in a SETI@home type 
of way. Assuming you have some sort of reasonable bandwidth, and chunky CPU 
intensive stuff to run this extra "night time" power might be nice. Keep in 
mind though, that these dual G5s, high end Opterons, and the very fast Xeons 
are *so* much faster than most of the computer detritus hanging around most 
labs, it might not actually be worth your while. 

But, it might be... and you have essentially a couple of extra nodes free, 
and therefore a little more bang for your buck...

On Friday 05 March 2004 10:41 am, you wrote:
> 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'.