You might recognize this computer:
Then again you might not. After all a black box isn’t very distinctive. Regardless, this is the central server of my home network. It stores 3.25 terabytes of data between internal and external hard drives, can serve video to any computer in the house, and is accessible via VNC or ssh anywhere in the world (that I can get internet access), and draws less electricity than the average lightbulb. And now, after the arrival of a gift and less than an hour’s work it’s more useful than ever.
As I outlined before, the main bottleneck I faced was processor speed. With the arrival of the components I’d talked about that bottleneck no longer exists! Everything happens blazingly fast. I can’t wait to try out WUBLAST on this new and improved machine. I want to build a private database of the rice, sorghum, maize, and brachypodium genomes (and platypus genome, why not?) all in one location.
The wonderful thing about doing bioinformatics, is that if you just feel like messing around and seeing what there is to find, it doesn’t take hundreds of dollars of reagents in a controlled lab environment with super expensive pieces of equipment.
But applications later, for now I just want to enjoy how cool it is!
Annoying stats:
Total processing ghz (given differences in processor architecture, this is really meaningless):
2.5×2(linux box)+2.0×2(windows box)+2.6×2(new mac laptop)+1.5(old back laptop)+1(PC laptop)+3.2×3(Xbox 360)= 26.3 ghz* of processor speed on my local network.
Total storage space:
2000+750+500 (linux box) + 500×2+250 (windows box) + 200 new mac laptop + 80 old mac + 30 old PC laptop = ~4.8 Terabytes of storage space connected to the local network
*processor speed estimates do not take into account the ability of some programs to use discrete graphics cards for general purpose calculations.