Today is the 6th of January – and the 12th Night after Christmas. Superstition argues that it is today at the latest when the decorations from Christmas should be taken down and put away to avoid bad luck. With a corporate restructuring due to complete tomorrow, I need all of the good luck that I can get!
Whilst putting away the decorations I came across a pile of former playthings. The tools on which I learned very much of the bioinformatics tricks and techniques that I rely upon today! Amongst these toys I have an eclectic array of old SGI boxes (indy, indigo2 impact), Sun workstations (Sparc 10 pizza boxes and Sparc IPX lunch boxes galore) along with other slightly more bizarre hardware such as Sun Javastations and ancient RAID arrays.
Why do I have this junk? Back as a PostDoc I decided that there was more to bioinformatics and computing that the obligatory DEC alpha and the piece-of-$%&* Windows workstations available at the time. I spent a lot of time and money (ebay.de was my friend) buying end-of-life Unix hardware and running cool software (beyond NCBItools) such as openPBS to get complex genome analysi jobs running on machines that were rather fantastically expensive when they were new!
Those were pretty good times. Bioinformatics hardware is now kind of sucky. At home I have a couple of self-build linux servers and a Mac laptop. At work I have some pretty OK HP Xeon workstations, and at the University the group still runs some now rather dated Dell rack servers as a modest Beowulf. There isn’t really anything cool out there anymore is there.
My next goal for this year (sponsorship, career and readership allowing) is to start the process of buying some of the slightly more off-the-wall hardware to start seeing what the new boundaries of bioinformatics hardware could be? Are you interested?
Please post examples of great hardware that you are running bioinformatics on! Which ancient hardware do you still run?
What should bioinformaticians drive?