In article <1996Sep12.155933 at bphvax>,
caal at bphvax.biophysics.rochester.edu (Charles A. Alexander) writes:
>Hello
>[...]>
>We also want to provide molecular modelling tools for the people we
>support and it seems that SGI and SUNS have a lot of tools available for
>these applications as well.
Don't try to run molecular modelling tools on a server! I mean,
if you want to use one of Whatif, Quanta, o, setor, molscript and so
on to do molecular modelling, it's better to dedicate a Indigo2 or an
SGI like that (that's what we do), else you will make interactives
remote processes really slow.
>Anybody have any recommendations on what kind of machines would be
>able to handle the kind of processing power required for both these
>applications for a peak load of about 10-15 users simultaneously. We
>have a total of about 50 users and growing.
We have about 600 users, with pics at 30-40 users. we use
a Sparc server 1000 E (4 processors). I think, it's better to use
a multiprocessor machine. Note that we build our SRS indexes on
a DEC calculator (from Xtallography group, thanks ;-)
>I don't want to start a holy war but should we look at Suns or SGIs ?
>Anybody care to share their experiences ? How stable are the OS' and
>how difficult are they to manage. My limited experience tells me that
>SGIs are easier to handle. I'll apologize in advance if my ignorance
>is showing.
I use or used GCG on all of those machines, and I "feel" the
better configuration to be a DEC server with 2 or 3 processors. An
Indigo for molecular modelling. We also recently put our external
server (for SRS, GCGdoc and so on) on another Sparc server (sparc20).
>Thanks in advance. BTW, anybody have an updated spec sheet on how GCG
>performs on various platforms ?
Of course, all of this depends of the money you have, because
a DEC 2500, 3 proc, is quite expensive...
If this helps,
Francois.
P.S.: I don't think that a UNIX system is secure, and it gives some
problems to users to understand how it works...Sorry.
--
Francois Jeanmougin
Service de bioinformatique / bioinformatics service
IGBMC BP 163
67404 Illkirch France
tel : (33) 88 65 32 71
e-mail : jeanmougin at igbmc.u-strasbg.fr
"Si les choses ne sont pas ce qu'elles sont,
c'est qu'elles ne sont pas ce qu'elles devraient etre"
Pierre Dac "citant" De Gaulle.
