Hey Gang, I've been called in at the last moment to "consult" on the purchase of a cluster for a sequencing project. Admittedly, I know nothing about life science clusters, despite having been subscribed to this list from its inception. I am not making any money on this consulting, just helping out a neighbouring academic lab. So what I know at this point is that they have about $Cdn 200K to spend. They hae already talked to Sun, and Sun is offering them a "sweetheart" deal for (something) at about $120k. My only exposure is to a G4/G5 cluseter from BioTeam. I am impressed with it andit works really well for my purposes, and Im guessing it would work well for theirs too. I'm guessing a linux cluster would perfrom nicely too. The lab currently does not have a bioinforatician, but I thnik they have money for one. I'll probably just end up pointing them to Glen, Joe , and Chris, but any advice, suggestions, and pointers to where I can get a little more familiarity, well shucks, that would really be swell. Decidedly, g. -- Gary Van Domselaar, PhD. Postdoctoral Fellow, Computing Science and Biological Sciences University of Alberta Edmonton, AB, Canada Phone: 780-492-5969 Assistant Director, Bioinformatics.Org gary at bioinformatics.org