• Question: how powerful is your PC

    Asked by to Ian, Zena on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Zena Hira

      Zena Hira answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Which one? :p

      My iMac is pretty old. 8Gb RAM, 2.7GhZ Core i5, 4 cores

      MacBook Pro is 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 16GB RAM

      And there is also a server with about 30 cores and 20Gb RAM

    • Photo: Ian Simpson

      Ian Simpson answered on 21 Jun 2014:

      Like Zena, not particularly powerful, a Mac Book Pro mainly (you’ll notice a trend of Mac use amongst Bioinformaticians !).

      All of our serious computing is done on servers that have a lot of compute and memory. We have servers that are 64-core and 0.5TB RAM for our development work. When we let things lose we use the University High Performance Computing (HPC) environment which has something like 1000 core.

      Increasingly we are using computing in the “cloud” with companies like Amazon and Google although quite a few Universities are also developing their own “cloud” infrastructures. This means we can use server configured however we like without having to physically install and maintain them which is quite cost effective.

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