Apple to Award Workgroup Clusters to Scientists

Graff writes "Apple is giving away five Apple Workgroup Clusters for Bioinformatics (each worth approximately $40,000) to four higher education researchers and one non-education researcher. A panel of independent scientists and Apple will choose the lucky researchers."

Comments

Apple and bioinformatics

[Neil Blender]

Apple (as well as other computer companies like IBM) are getting very interested in bioinformatics. They have loaned us a ton of equipment for free even though our product is linux based. Of course, Apple has always had a stronghold in academics.

Re:Apple and bioinformatics

[harvardian]

"Apple has always had a stronghold in academics"

That's a bit broad. K-12 education, sure, but at the bioinformatics lab I worked with, we worked exclusively with IBM. The attractiveness of using consumer-level Macs in a grade school setting most certainly doesn't translate to a high-performance computing environment. That might change as Apple moves into this space, however...we'll see.

United Devices

[kyoko21]

Apple should give a set away to United Devices (Profit) or Grid. Both of these ventures specialize in distributed Cancer/Drug simulations. Let's find a cure for breast and prostate cancer!!!! Go Go Go!!!

Re:More trouble than it's worth?

[Erwos]

Um, no.

Market share and install base are definitely linked. If Apple's only selling 3% of computers, their install base is going to trend to 3% over time, holding all other things equal.

Mathematical example: total market is 100 computers, Apple has 3% market share)
Year 0: 6 Macs, 150 PCs (so Apple has about 3.8% of the install base when we start)
Year 1: 9 Macs, 247 PCs (install base is 3.5%)
Year 2: 12 Macs, 344 PCs (install base is 3.3%)
Year 3: 15 Macs, 441 PCs (install base is 3.2%)

I think you get the picture. Market share is not representative of total install base RIGHT NOW, but is certainly a good indicator of what's going to happen in the future. If you disagree, that's too bad, because I've just mathematically shown that you're wrong. Market share and install base are definitely linked.[1]

Apple's profitability really has nothing to do with their install base so much as their margins. If I'm selling stuff with a huge mark-up on actual costs, I could sell 30 pieces of it and still make money, even if the total market is 3 billion pieces.

-Erwos

[1] As for your "PCs don't last as long as Macs": prove it. I've used Macs for years, and Apple's build quality is not as good as people make it out to be. I'm not going to factor in differing "computer decays" without any kind of proof for them.

Re:BFD

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Probably because it's not an outright grant, but a contest which (theoretically) anyone can enter. And there are a fair number of /.ers who might be interested. I'd enter myself, but my chances of winning as a grad student are probably somewhere between 0 and NULL.

computing power is unfairly distributed

[SuperBanana]

For the mad scientist who has everything!

If your definition of "mad scientist" is "person working on weapons of mass destruction", ie, nuclear weapons, most of them already have the world's largest clusters. Pretty sad that we still consider it important to build better nuclear weapons even though we've got thousands of them, and not a single legitimate target for them(the whole deterrence thing is ridiculous- if it's just about deterrence, we only need a dozen or so).

It'd be nice to see some computing horsepower, if only a small piece, go to those trying to do something other than make better nuclear bombs or look for little green men...ie something (gasp) productive.

Re:The award should be for PCs

[strook]

Most bioinformatics software, Windows versions are barely supported. Blast, the SAM toolkit, Clustal_, belvu, BioPerl and BioPython, all of these work perfectly on Mac OS X. Among the more computational bioinformaticists it's very handy to be able to recompile the publicly available software for your needs. Also, it's very common in bioinformatics to have questions you need to answer that don't exactly fit the parameters of the software, so it's important to have an environment where it's easy to write scripts to analyze text files and control the (possibly distributed) running of algorithms. In short, the field of bioinformatics is a perfect fit for Unix-based OSes and a fairly godawful fit for Windows. I don't think this is pure slash-bias; I think most all bioinformatics researchers would agree.

This part slightly OT, but this reminds me how much better bioinformatics tools would be if there were more people who could contribute to the open source tools in the field. Often times a widely used program is released open source, but there are so few people who can code well and also take notice of bioinformatics tools that bugs don't get solved like they could. Somebody please make belvu stop crashing all the damn time, make phylip accept alternate data formats, et cetera... I've already got my advisor's software to debug.

Re:Apple clusters?

[Ffakr]

I do realize your comment is tongue in cheek.. but Bioinformatic tools (some of them like BLAST) run multiples faster on Apple hardware than on x86 hardware. Apparently apps like BLAST really run great on Altivec.
I haven't seen anything recently, but at one time BLAST ran up to 16x faster on a G4 than a P4.

Re:Apple

[nettdata]

You're right...

My cousin does cancer research at Harvard, and I design/write software for a living. He found that there was a huge empty space for software that would help him do his job (cancer research), so 2 years ago we started a software company that specializes in reagent management (cryogenic storage, dna plasmids, oligos, antibodies, protocols, animal experiments, etc., all cross-referenced), and made sure that it was 100% Java and cross-platform.

While we really have no direct competition (yet), it is very interesting to see the platform requirement limitations (mostly DOS/Windows) that a lot of the other software companies have. There really is a huge shortage of cross-platform software.

Our experience has shown that most commercial labs tend to be Windows based, while most academic labs are Mac based. It is also not uncommon to have the Academic labs have 1 or 2 Win32 boxes that are there just to run a particular program they're using. It also appears that the IT departments in academia tend to use Linux back-end servers, with an interestingly high occurance of Yellow Dog. (That's Linux on PPC, for those of you unfamiliar with YD). Usually, we've found that the YD servers are older G3 and G4 towers that have been repurposed.

Now, these are the environments that we've been exposed to, and may not accurately represent the group as a whole, but regardless, it's been an interesting and enlightening experience seeing what/how different labs are currently (and used to) using by way of software.