[Open-bio-l] Re: [Biohackathon] Apple contact

[chris dagdigian]

Hey Elia-

We (bioteam.net) are working on the Xserve cluster that will be housed 
in Apple's executive briefing center in California and I think there is 
a really good chance that we'll get hired to work on a couple of largish 
sized xserve "bioclusters" in the next few months. Our Apple guru (Bill 
Van Etten) is travelling right now but I'm sure that once I can reach 
him :) he can give you the contact info you need to reach the right 
people at Apple directly.

Regarding the free apple stuff- my recollection was that Apple was 
seeking "suggestions" from various people in the community as to how 
they could best seed some of their hardware to key people in the field. 
I'm not actually sure that anything happened to this because I remember 
peeking at some of the names submitted and I don't think any of them got 
seeded.

If I can't reach Bill today I'll dig through my Apple business cards and 
ask someone who is the contact for Xserve in Singapore.

The Xserve units are worth evaluating if you are thinking of a cluster. 
It will depend though on your application mix if the price/performance 
is going to be reasonable.  Some groups will benefit and others may be 
better off with linux-on-intel. We've advised some people to go with 
Apple and others to stay away.

-Chris


Elia Stupka wrote:

>Hello guys,
>
>I might soon be putting in an order for a medium-size cluster for
>bioinformatics. Among the options I'd like to look into the new Apple
>XServe. I was wondering if somebody could dig up contacts of Apple people
>that wanted to donate laptops to hackathon people, to see if they would be
>interested into this here in Singapore...
>
>Elia
>
>  
>