[Bioclusters] Request for discussions-How to build a biocluster Part 6 (Misc.)

[Sylvain Foisy]

Hi,

A reminder: this is coming from a total newbie at this BioCluster stuff. 
it is also to serve as the seed of a tutorial/history-of-building site 
for our creation. I am a total newbie in UNIX administration and 
installation. This is why we will get a system administrator to help us 
out. But I still have to figure out the right questions to ask!!

OTHER SOFTWARES

Besides BLAST, what other bioinfo software are known to work in cluster 
config? I would imagine that FASTA, the HMMER suite and any software 
that work in embarrassingly parallel fashion will. Anybody has 
experience running multi-softwarer clusters?

Also, can a cluster do let's say, BLAST and RNA folding together? or 
BLAST and molecular modelling? At 8 nodes, we will concentrate on BLAST 
but we are planning a 32 nodes stage soon afterward and the demand is 
there.

CLUSTERS HELPING CLUSTERS

Another point that has been raised in our group is the fact that if some 
clusters might be less busy than others, is it possible for the head of 
the busy one to get help from the nodes of a less busy cluster? I ask 
because our projected cluster is to be a public-access resource. Another 
cluster is also planned for philogeny analysis by a group in the same 
department. In exchange for maintaining a mirror of GenBank, they are 
offering some of their horsepower to us. Is this feasible?

Am I missing something?

This is open for helpful and constructive discussion

I know that lots of my questions have been asked before but I found some 
of the answers to be very cryptic. By pooling my questions in this 
multipost, I invite discussion on the hows of putting a BioCluster 
together for the less technically inclined among us!

Sylvain

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Sylvain Foisy, Ph. D.
Manager
BIONEQ - Le Reseau quebecois de bioinformatique
Genome-Quebec
Tel.: (514) 343-6111 poste 5188
E-mail: foisys@medcn.umontreal.ca
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