Hi all, I have been asked for advice on hardware by my boss, but I am slightly out of my depth here because I really do software. He wants to set up a bio facility which provides web/grid services (probably Axis or GT3/4) to a substantial user community (UK-wide but with access control, so probably in the region of hundreds or perhaps thousands of potential users). Services will include the usual things things like BLAST, ClustalW, protein structure analysis etc. -- probably a small subset of what EBI offers. The computational back end is likely to be our UK National Grid or similar, but either way he is only providing the server that hosts the middleware and metascheduler. He is wondering what hardware setup setup is best for this. We are probably looking at running the web/grid services out of Tomcat. Would a single high-spec machine be sufficient for this kind of thing? Or would one have several servers doing the same thing in parallel? In which case, what spec should they have and how would they be coordinated? many thanks Micha -- -------------------------------------------------- Dr Micha M Bayer Grid Developer, BRIDGES Project National e-Science Centre, Glasgow Hub 246c Kelvin Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ Scotland, UK Email: michab at dcs.gla.ac.uk Project home page: http://www.brc.dcs.gla.ac.uk/projects/bridges/ Personal Homepage: http://www.brc.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~michab/ Tel.: +44 (0)141 330 2958