Hi All,
I'm currently studying bioinformatics and am becoming sick of my laptop being held up by long jobs. As such I am thinking about building a headless linux box that I can just send jobs to and retrieve results from... Unfortunately I have no idea where to start :(

Could anyone recommend a suitable build for this (keeping the price within 'poor uni student' range)?

Thanks in advance!

Josha

http://www.ausgamers.com/forums/general/thread.php/3168721
?????

Hows 30 odd bucks?

got an old iphone or ipod/ipad?

http://www.ausgamers.com/forums/general/thread.php/3168721
?????

Hows 30 odd bucks?

Interesting! Any word on when/when Raspberry Pi will be available?

got an old iphone or ipod/ipad?

Unfortunately no :(

Interesting! Any word on when/when Raspberry Pi will be available?

According to their website, the units are about to ship. I hope he got enough of them made because everyone and their dog is going to want one.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Edit: It turns out the 1st run of production is only a few thousand units and can be ordered by around the begining of Feb.

According to their website, the units are about to ship. I hope he got enough of them made because everyone and their dog is going to want one.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Edit: It turns out the 1st run of production is only a few thousand units and can be ordered by around the begining of Feb.

I think that should definitely be worth the wait! I'm assuming it will be able to run Python, Java, etc...
Thanks for the heads-up!

Josha

These things might also be of interest: http://www.ausgamers.com/forums/general/thread.php/3161623 although I think they are oriented more towards storage than processing so might be too big/expensive.

I have another mate who did bioinformatics and he is constantly telling me about his processing work being done on like 64 cpu machines (I have a photo of one of his taskmanager windows, it's hilarious)... so I would guess you are more after something to do number crunching on? In that case the Pi might not be the best thing just because its CPU/RAM might be a bit limited.

Because he's working professionally at a company that seems to have a "price is no object" philosophy on hardware he's probably not too aware of what is good on the low end, but if you clarify exactly what you're trying to do I can pass it on to him and see if he has any suggestions.

processing work being done on like 64 cpu machines

Sounds like they should have migrated to doing work on GPGPUs and all that CUDA/OpenCL jazz a long time ago!

Though if the company's anything like basically every single one that I have dealt with, it's a million times easier to justify the cost of trying to keep up the pace with machines of 64 CPUs than the (significantly smaller) cost of having a team competently re-engineer mission-critical systems to work on a different platform.

That said, I know nothing of what bioinformaticists actually do, so what do I know!

Sounds like they should have migrated to doing work on GPGPUs and all that CUDA/OpenCL jazz a long time ago!

Though if the company's anything like basically every single one that I have dealt with, it's a million times easier to justify the cost of trying to keep up the pace with machines of 64 CPUs than the (significantly smaller) cost of having a team competently re-engineer mission-critical systems to work on a different platform.

That said, I know nothing of what bioinformaticists actually do, so what do I know!

Yeh I should ask about that; at the time it was just at the start of the CUDA/GPU revolution so I'm sure it was on their radar but possibly too immature as a solution to justify the cost of converting over codebase. Now it seems like a bit of a no-brainer if you're doing a lot of number crunching (.. I have no idea what's involved in coding for GPU though... google tells me there are several alternatives for Python so it might be a good way of doing stuff)

Imo get an ipad and put a frame around it

got an old iphone or ipod/ipad?

I'll bite.. what would your recommendation be if there was one lying around?

I'll bite.. what would your recommendation be if there was one lying around?

jailbreak it and install openssh?

they're just a cut down version of osx, still runs a unix kernel etc

How does number 1 get nuked?!

http://guidesmedia.ign.com/guides/9846/images/psyduck.gif

This forum needs to adopt the Stonecutters rule of hierarchy.

My favourite Linux is Ubuntu

If you want a stable long life build, try Ubuntu Server LTS

Like all the good things in life, it's free!