On 13 May 2004, at 2:22 pm, Arnon Klein wrote: > Doing this in Java is actualy pretty easy, since RMI lets you > transport an object containing both code and data over the network. But you'll be bitten by the usual problem which is that the compute/IO ratio for most bioinformatics applications is very low, as has been discussed on this list before ad nauseam. You'll spend so much time getting the data to the compute node that you might as well have run the compute locally. And your network admin might have things to say about the whole idea, too. :-) The bandwidth of gigabit ethernet is *theoretically* about an order of magnitude less than the machine's own memory. It's actually much worse than that in practice. Especially if you've got a network of these little buggers all competing for the bandwidth trying to get each other to run stuff. Leaving aside the political nightmare that grid ideas create. The only reason Seti@home succeeded as a grid computing project is that the compute/IO ratio is *huge*. Genomics applications just can't do this, although conceivably some things such as molecular dynamics simulations might. <troll>And it's never going to perform decently in java anyway</troll> Tim