[Bioperl-l] operating systems and bio-computing

[Chris Dagdigian]

Hi Thomas,

You may be able to canvas a group of more hardware-centric folks by 
posting your query to the bioclusters or biodevelopers lists run by the 
fine folks at bioinformatics.org. Here are some URLs to the listinfo pages:


https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters
https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/biodevelopers

My $.02 follows

Linux is the future for scientific computing in the life sciences for 
many reasons including cost, performance, developer mindshare and 
available applications/sourcecode/algorithims. Management is pretty easy 
if you have at least one skilled admin...even for clusters of linux 
boxes doing heavy computation. Advanced visualization is still flaky I 
think as you need to be real careful about video cards and driver issues 
etc.

Solaris/Sparc is going to be viable because people will always need 
big-memory and big-SMP systems to run data warehouses and other 
applications on. Few people want to purchase Irix or Alphaservers for 
these uses anymore and 64bit Linux computing is still gathering steam in 
our community (yay opteron!).

SGI has a new big-memory, modular CPU system that runs 64 bit Linux 
called Altix that looks pretty cool. This may be something to seriously 
look at if you are an SGI shop already.

An Apple Powerbook running Mac OS X 10.2.x is by far the best unix / 
scientific workstation I have ever seen or used. The fact that it is in 
a portable form factor is even better. There is a very real trend of 
engineering and science-centric people making the switch to Mac OS X. 
Just go to a bioinformatics conference sometime and count the Apple 
laptops in the room. The Apple Xserve rackmount servers are great and 
_very_ easy to manage especially if you want to run a small biocluster 
but they scale only to a certain point.


-Chris






-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag at sonsorol.org>
BioTeam Inc. - Independent Bio-IT & Informatics consulting
Office: 617-666-6454, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193
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Thomas Keller wrote:
> Greetings,
> This is a generic question about bio-computing platforms and operating 
> systems. I have an SGI running IRIX 6.5, I got it because the imaging 
> service my core facility runs was using the SGI for image processing. 
> Since then the company whose software we use has switched to Redhat 
> Linux on a PC since it is so much cheaper. I really like IRIX, but feel 
> that it is not being supported/developed like linux or the mac OS X, at 
> least I'm finding it difficult to install new modules because the C 
> library requirements, for example are not available for IRIX.
> 
> Could the many knowledgeable folk of this list share their wisdom on the 
> topic of what platform(s) they see as being the easiest to support and 
> develop in the area of bioinformatics?
> 
> Thanks,
> Tom K.