[Biodevelopers] Workstation Selection for Bioinformatics Research

[Malay Kumar Basu]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Chip Coward wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
>     I am a researcher in bioinformatics at Drexel University and we are
> setting up a computational lab for research and teaching in Computational
> Systems Biology/Bioinformatics. We are looking for workstations for our lab
> using existing software tools or developing new tools to perform molecular
> modeling/visualization (e.g. RasMol/Protein Explorer), searching the genome,
> stochastic modelling/cellular automata, ect. We are considering both SUN
> workstations and Dell workstations (Precision 450/Precision 650) although we
> would be open to consider other platforms if there are compelling reasons. I
> am writing to get input/information that will help us make a decision on
> platform selection. I am leaning toward selecting the Dell Workstation due
> to the theme that prevades these email lists about use of Linux which seems
> to be the way the bioinformatics community is heading. If we purchased the
> Dell system I would configure it to support both Windows and Linux under the
> assumption that by supporting both operating systems, we would have more
> options/flexibility for tool selection.
> 
 
Good choice. Almost all bioinformatics software nowadays have Linux
support. And noone can beat GNU/Linux when it comes to software
development. And Linux really scale very well to move to cluster
computing. It is so easy, one of our Indian distribution actually modified
RedHat 8 to give cluster installtion as standard installation option.
Except for some legacy proprietary software you can virtually manage to do
all your bioinformatics on Linux.

Cheers,

Malay