Posted on 01/12/2004 9:17:07 PM PST by Swordmaker
NEW YORK - When noted biologist David Botstein was lured from Stanford University to head the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton, he had his choice of computing systems. But Botstein says he outfitted the center almost soup to nuts with Apple computers and servers, which are used for everything from desktop applications to comparing lengths of genetic code. By eschewing the more expensive workstations that high-tech biologists have come to rely on, he says he has also cut down on the cost of maintaining his number-crunching machines.
Botstein's not alone. Apple Computer and its Macintosh, which has long sat on the desktops of many molecular biologists, are now seeing wider use in genomics, the study of how many genes work together within organisms. High-speed, stackable servers from Apple are even being clustered together into supercomputers. The third-fastest supercomputing cluster in the world, based at Virginia Tech, is composed of the first 1,100 PowerMac G5s to roll off of the assembly line. Says Michael Swenson, an analyst who covers life sciences computing for IDC: "Apple's starting to make some waves."
Analysts warn that biology and supercomputing won't be a big revenue driver for Apple. "I don't see it putting many pennies on the bottom line," says Peter Kastner, an analyst at the Aberdeen Group in Boston. And Apple says that high-performance clusters will never be its focus. "I don't believe anyone in the next year is going to say, 'Apple, the supercomputer company'," says Alex Grossman, Apple's director, product management, server hardware.
According to Hassan Aref, dean of engineering at Virginia Tech, Apple was initially reluctant to participate in building the university's supercomputer. "It wasn't why they made the G5," Aref says. But Apple did eventually come around.
The payoff for Virginia Tech: a supercomputer at a twentieth of what it would otherwise cost. The resulting cluster ranks as the world's third fastest, according to the Top500 list of supercomputers compiled by the University of Tennessee, the University of Mannheim and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. That's a big bang for the buck. The top machine was constructed by NEC in Japan, and the second fastest at Los Alamos National Laboratory byHewlett-Packard, which makes the Alpha servers that were used to map the human genome. Both systems reportedly boast a price tag north of $200 million, more than twenty times the cost for Virginia Tech's machine. Those cost-savings could extend down to smaller, less high-profile scientific clusters.
"Despite its reputation, [Apple] is not more expensive," says William Van Etten, co-founder of the BioTeam, a consulting group that has set up Mac clusters for biologists. "When including maintenance and support, one could easily argue that it's cheaper."
Some biologists have always been drawn to the Mac's visual interface. "Molecular biologists in general have always been sort of a Mac holdout," says David Adelson, an associate professor at Texas A&M University. "When I started out as a grad student I bought one of the very first Mac's off of the assembly line." So Adelson was excited when Apple changed its operating system into a variant of Unix, the operating system on scientific workstations that is essential to most of the computing in genetics. Working with the BioTeam, he developed a software system for clustering Apple Xserve machines. He says his "little cluster" outperforms some of Texas A&M's supercomputers for genetics work.
Apple's hardware isn't the only reason for the speed. A lot of genomics software has been optimized for Apple processors. Will Gilbert, a professor at the University of New Hampshire, is best known for using his iPod to carry a genome from one server to another. But his actual pitch for Apple hardware goes further. Using software optimized by Apple and Genentech (nyse: DNA - news - people ), he was able to cut the time for comparing big strands of chimpanzee and human DNA from 16 hours to two minutes using an Apple computer.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
More Cost of Ownership evidence for the Macintosh...
With Apple's new XGrid software you can tell it to grab unused CPU time from all the machines on your LAN. You can basically make a smallish supercomputer just by waiting for everyone else in the office to go home.
It seems like these reports are always vague on the details. (hardware model, memory installed, operating system version, etc.)
They do lock up, programs do freeze.
Yes, if the program contains a logic error, it can go into an infinite loop and freeze. (As a programmer, I do this all the time.) But it's very easy to kill a frozen program with Mac OS X's "Force Quit" command, and the operating system continues to function normally. Application errors are generally not a platform issue.
I hate having to reboot when unreal tourney 2003 won't let me join in.
I'm not familiar with that game, but it sounds like the known issue with the 2225.1 update. When it locks up, does pressing the command+option+escape keys bring up the Force Quit window?
The Xserver hasn't been any more stable!
Are you referring to an Apple Xserve ?
Funny the first time. dull the second and subsequent times.
Also, untrue. He is not a Mac user, never was.
I used to sound like a lot of the Mac bashers here. When the flat panel iMac came out, I thought, "wow, that's cool." It was time to upgrade my old PC, and after looking around, I settled on the flat-panel iMac. What finally convinced me to go with the iMac was the construction quality. This was when Compaq was putting the colored panels on their computers to make them look like the original iMacs. There was something about the way the flat panel on the iMac would glide smoothly and silently and stop exactly where I wanted, compared to the Compaq with some dorky little panel on front that screechily opened to reveal a cd holder that would hold about 5 cds. I checked the prices on everything, and Sony and IBM were the only companies that had nearly the build quality, and by the time they were equipped like the Mac, they cost more. I had used every version of Windows from the run-time version that came with Excel 1.0 up to 2000. Windows ME finally killed my allegience to MS and the PC system.
When I got the Mac, I noticed that all the things that sort of worked on my old PCs actually worked on the Mac. I realized that the features that were grafted onto the Windows system like trying to nail limbs on a tree were integrated into the Mac seamlessly.
I use a 17" flat panel now, and there's no way I'd ever go back to Windows.
That only applies to programs running on Mac OS 9 or earlier (which have been discontinued for a while now), or programs executing in the "Classic" environment.
Users do not allocate memory for native Mac OS X applications. Those memory management details are handled automatically by the PowerPC hardware and the operating system.
I know someone like that too. He would install extensions and control panels from various other computers with different operating system versions, often with disastrous results. (Now Mac OS X prevents him from trashing his operating system, so he refuses to use it.)
That rule would eliminate every programmer on the planet.
I'm trying to find out if we're going to have a big FR demonstration and beer bash when the Clinton Library opens here on November 14th.
I've sort of followed your journeys around the Internet, and am glad to see you back here and doing well.
best regards,
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