via snowdeal:
Apple releases new workgroup cluster
So admittedly I'm a Mac guy trapped in a PC world, but this had me drooling. It wouldn't be as much fun as building a cluster yourself, but still, this is a pretty impressive system for the money. Plus in comes preinstalled with BLAST, hmmer, clustalW and more from BioTeam's Inquiry) I wonder if I can talk my boss into this......
Comments
Apple creates workgroup cluster for Bioinformatics
Hi
Buy as many G5 as you can afford and install the packages from www.ebioinformatics.org
Done by scientists for scientists. Read EMBnetNews on how you install and use the one click install packages.
Regards
Klas
ah, post reappears
More general cluster resources are here.
I'm a "generic PC + Linux" man myself and have long maintained that Apple is all about style over substance, with price hikes accordingly. These things look pretty cool though and would probably save a lot of hassle for departments wanting to get quickly into bioclusters.
post reappears...
nfi what happened, the post went back into the queue after I moved it to the front page ? I'm considering changing the default to move posts automatically to the front page.
Now onto your points:
1. Apple is all about style over substance
Sorry, I don't buy that at all. Either your trolling or you have finally become a total Linux zealot :) Put simply it's hard to deny the power of OS X as a development platform (disclaimer: I use OS X). Recently I read somewhere that many core bioperl developers have switched from linux to OS X, you can read Tim O'Reilly's switchers article here and a more recent article from Wired celebrating the 20th anniversary of the mac.
This is not to say that OS X is superior to Linux, the both have their advantages and disadvantages e.g. price in the case of OS X.
2. Off the shelf cluster solutions
If any company could do this successfully I'd put my money on Apple. The Xserve G5 looks super sweet I must say, but rather pricey. In which case if price is an issue you can't beat the generic Linux+PC combination. Although not an off the shelf solution, the learning experience of building your own cluster is invaluable in my opinion (as our experience has shown).