The CBRI purchased a Sun Microsystems x4100 with four cores and 8GB of RAM to serve as an assembler, what the vendor calls a ‘DataRig’, to process data from a Genome Sequencer 20™ System, developed by 454 Life Sciences, an ultra-high-throughput automated DNA sequencing system capable of resolving hundreds of thousands of DNA sequences in one run.

While the minimum suggested requirements for the DataRig were not impressive the x4100 device is:

The Opteron processors are rated to provide a significant boost over similar Xeon systems. We plan to run a 64-bit openSUSE LINUX environment and integrate the system in to the LENTI/NIS domain. The campus SAN project has not answered the question about compatible HBAs. We anticipate the successful deployment of this device may require the purchase of others for use as pipeline processors. In this case it might be best to mount the /san partition from an existing Tier II server via NFS over GB network connection. This architecture allows for an arbitrary number of processing hosts, limited by the number of ports on the supporting GB switch and not SAN HBAs.

When the system is in production I will post relevant benchmark data.