Elia, Regarding the Sun 4 way Opteron, they are actually made by a company called Newisys. Specifically it is the Newisys 4300; see: http://www.newisys.com/products/4300.html You can get the exact same box from other vendors for a lot less than Sun. (When we were collecting bids for one, a vendor offered to silkscreen the Sun logo on one for us.) We got one with 4 X AMD846 CPUs, 16 GB RAM (8 X 2GB) and 4 X 73 GB U320 HDDs for right around $17,000 US. Granted, this vendor probably does not support Italy (frankly, I've found their after sale support in the U.S. to be a little lacking.) I also know that Sun can offer some unbelievable discounts to educational institutions, we have benefited from some of those ourselves. Whoever you get it from you probably won't be disappointed, we use ours for WGS sequence assembly and really love it. All I'm saying is, when it comes to buying Opterons from Sun, you really are paying for the logo since you can get identical kit from other vendors. Cheers, Kevin M. Carr ************************** Systems Administrator Genomics Technology Support Facility 202-D Biochemistry Bldg. Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824 Ph: (517) 353-6794 Fax:(517) 353-8638 ************************** > From: Elia Stupka <elia at tigem.it> > Reply-To: "Clustering, compute farming & distributed computing in life > science informatics" <bioclusters at bioinformatics.org> > Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 21:23:24 +0100 > To: "Clustering, compute farming & distributed computing in life science > informatics" <bioclusters at bioinformatics.org> > Subject: Re: [Bioclusters] Need some advice on a cluster for EST/cDNA > assembly, clustering > > I don't at all, it is just > a)I was making a negative remark on mainstream vendors > > b)currently equipping a lab located in Italy, we are limited in choice, > especially when it comes to good warranty/service (though officially > some of the vendors you mention are available, when it comes to > practice they don't have as good a support network here) > > c)being part of an important non-profit organization we get very sweet > deals from the mainstream guys such as HP and Sun (like servers for > free) so we cannot refuse ;) > > Elia > > > On 27 Feb 2005, at 20:26, Matt Temple wrote: > >> Why do you reject the quad Opteron computers (supporting 32 GB of RAM) >> from vendors like ASAComputers (and, no >> doubt, though I haven't checked from PCs for Everyone and others)? >> The computers, themselves, may not be from mainstream >> vendors, but they are from motherboard manufacturers that I'd be >> inclined to call mainstream -- SuperMicro, Tyan, ASUS. >> > > _______________________________________________ > Bioclusters maillist - Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org > https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters >