http://www.ausgamers.com/forums/general/thread.php/3168721
?????

Hows 30 odd bucks?

http://www.ausgamers.com/forums/general/thread.php/3168721
?????

Hows 30 odd bucks?

Interesting! Any word on when/when Raspberry Pi will be available?

Interesting! Any word on when/when Raspberry Pi will be available?

According to their website, the units are about to ship. I hope he got enough of them made because everyone and their dog is going to want one.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Edit: It turns out the 1st run of production is only a few thousand units and can be ordered by around the begining of Feb.

These things might also be of interest: http://www.ausgamers.com/forums/general/thread.php/3161623 although I think they are oriented more towards storage than processing so might be too big/expensive.

I have another mate who did bioinformatics and he is constantly telling me about his processing work being done on like 64 cpu machines (I have a photo of one of his taskmanager windows, it's hilarious)... so I would guess you are more after something to do number crunching on? In that case the Pi might not be the best thing just because its CPU/RAM might be a bit limited.

Because he's working professionally at a company that seems to have a "price is no object" philosophy on hardware he's probably not too aware of what is good on the low end, but if you clarify exactly what you're trying to do I can pass it on to him and see if he has any suggestions.

Sounds like they should have migrated to doing work on GPGPUs and all that CUDA/OpenCL jazz a long time ago!

Though if the company's anything like basically every single one that I have dealt with, it's a million times easier to justify the cost of trying to keep up the pace with machines of 64 CPUs than the (significantly smaller) cost of having a team competently re-engineer mission-critical systems to work on a different platform.

That said, I know nothing of what bioinformaticists actually do, so what do I know!

Yeh I should ask about that; at the time it was just at the start of the CUDA/GPU revolution so I'm sure it was on their radar but possibly too immature as a solution to justify the cost of converting over codebase. Now it seems like a bit of a no-brainer if you're doing a lot of number crunching (.. I have no idea what's involved in coding for GPU though... google tells me there are several alternatives for Python so it might be a good way of doing stuff)

got an old iphone or ipod/ipad?

I'll bite.. what would your recommendation be if there was one lying around?

My favourite Linux is Ubuntu

If you want a stable long life build, try Ubuntu Server LTS

Like all the good things in life, it's free!