bioinformatics workstation configuration

[sebl]

Hi,

I know there are already some threads dealing with minimal configuration of a workstation for bioinformatics, but people talk mostly about assembling or mapping speed. I am working on bacterial genomes, so assembling speed is not that much of a problem today.

I would like to configure a workstation machine to be able to do multiple genome comparisons, including whole genome alignments, blast all-against-all of genes and the following phylogenetic/tree building work, of something between, say, 100-300 genomes.

Could someone give me some hints on the minimal hardware configuration needed for these sort of tasks? I was told blast can be quite demanding on hardware.

Thanks a lot.

[GenoMax]

100-300 genomes at ~5 Mb each are going to add up to a significant amount of data so the configurations discussed in the past should be applicable in your case.

You would want to maximize the RAM (based on your budget). Something north of 64 GB would be preferable (ref: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%...l.pone.0011147)

[sebl]

Thank you.