CLOUD

By Tim Little -- Thinking it would takes month and months of around the clock work to get a Linux cluster up and running in the Bioinformatics lab, Dr. Mike Thomas was more then amazed at the simplicity of implementing his Apple Workgroup cluster. Coming from the bioinformatics lab at the University of Wisconsin, Thomas remembers the lab being populated by a measurable number of programmers and administrators all working together to implement bioinformatics on the linux cluster. Given this history with linux clusters when Thomas moved to Idaho State University (ISU) to setup the bioinformatics labs he hired a full time senior bioinformatics person just to administer and program utilities for a cluster. Dr. Thomas wanted to focus on getting results from the cluster and NOT on mixing and matching components to get to his end. When they explored the Xserve solution it was more then apparent they had found a correct answer to there specific compute problem. Today his administer spends very little time on the cluster and most of his time is spent aiding students and faculty modifying and running real work. To Thomas’s skepticism he is now sold on the Apple solution. While the hardware is only one side of the balance “real work” equation there has to be software. ISU’s choice for real world work is the BioTeam’s iNquiry bioinformatics package. Along with more than 200 bioinformatics tools, the iNquiry package can easily accept additional plugins making one of the most versatile tools available. Before having access the Apple Cluster, Mac OS X and iNquiry there was not a good central location for us to have all the tools we needed to conduct our research and teaching – stated Thomas. When working at the Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) ISU we had issues dealing with non-centralized resources and finding systems with enough computational power to meet our requirements. One more reason we choice iNquiry was its ability to interface with a number of the leading database programs. This is key in the way information is distributed and the performance we can realize with our searches. This is another advantage of our Apple over using NCBI resources which limits the uses of alternate databases to the quote - power users. Flexibility is key to creating a creative research environment and we need to explore and implement all the avenues available. With tools we have in place over what available just a few years back we can succeed in our evolutionary areas of expertise. Before implementing the Apple Workgroup system it could take days and even weeks to run a 100x phylogenetic reconstructions. Now we can run 1000x data sets in a matter hours and do this in parallel with other workloads and get results back in minutes or hours. While Apple has never been one to toy in the markets of supercomputing the bootstrap effect of the VT system is coming to life. The Xserver crew at Apple have a lot going for them, in the months to come the orders for more and more systems being used in variety of new innovative markets is going to come prevalent. Getting real work done is key to any advancement in technology and industry. Like in Thomas’s case his success in using Apple solution and getting work done has attracted rival universities to seek his guidance on they might use the same approach.