So I kept going a little here, just to see what falls out. http://topbiocluster.org/firststab.html has the results for 7 platforms, ranging from osx to tru64 etc. I basically applied the same recipe we talked about the other day, and wrote a: "platform independent parallel infrastructure agnostic protein processing pipeline suite" (also known as a bunch of really dodgy shell scripts, and a big old compile the whole darn bag from scratch approach:-)). You would never guess, but certain machines perform differently to others. This first stab is in no way an attempt to classify anything, some of our hardware is showing it's age, and I did not tweak a single parameter. This data does have a // aspect, and also includes LSF submission to a farm, it is very small scale, just to test the ideas. The point is _not_ to actually use the scripts (they suck), but rather do what ever you can to get the fastest possible result for a given set of target ids that are presented against two sets of data files. I think the real magic here will to be use what ever hardware, raid storage, mpiblast, hardware accelerator, maspar, SAN, GPFS, palm pilot based cluster you have to be able to get the answer in the fastest possible time. If we manage to do this, we as a community will be able to identifying the 'topbiocluster'. I think we will also learn a lot of how people have things connected and built. We know it's more than the component parts, the topcluster will be a union of all the parts, with smart folk making them work. To reiterate the results in this first stab were not optimized in anyway, and are just simple, the scripts are there if you want to see what I did. However even being naive they do start to show the possible variation. They are also not ranked, there is no 'winner' from these results. With luck, the community out there will know how to drive their hardware in the best possible manner to get this simple protein pipeline to deliver the results in the shortest possible time. We can (later) have further 'contests' for gromacs, dna pipelines etc, but it might be worth us taking a stab at this first one. Just in case folk think I've been 'drinking the koolaid' (as they seem to say a lot here) let me know if you would be at all interested in participating by return email to me. I'll collect the results and let folk know if we have enough critical mass. If we get enough numbers we can get the ball rolling, I'll post up the data files, and to be honest that should be all we need, everyone on this list knows how to compile and run these tools. Assuming good luck and a following wind, we may even be able to have a bioclusters meeting to discuss the fall out, and all the things we have discovered. But I'm getting ahead of myself, again let me know directly if you would be willing to take part in the experiment, ok 'contest' :-) Best regards, J.