Adding to its support of The BioTeam’s iNquiry informatics software, Apple announced this week that it will now offer pre-configured Workgroup Clusters with two popular numerical analysis programs: Wolfram’s gridMathematica and MathWorks’ MATLAB.
“With the bioinformatics cluster [the Workgroup Cluster with iNquiry pre-installed], we found a broader base of scientists wanted to use the combination of pre-configured Xserve hardware with Mac OS X and other [system] software,” says Liz Kerr, Apple’s director, science and technology markets.
Apple has offered the Workgroup Cluster for Bioinformatics for about two years. (The product won a Best of Show Award at the 2004 Bio-IT World Conference + Expo.) The offering is designed to give a research group an out-of-the-box cluster with optimized, easy-to-use informatics applications.
The bioinformatics offering includes a pre-configured cluster and The BioTeam’s iNquiry software. The latter comprises about 200 informatics applications, including BLAST and HMMER. The iNquiry software provides a graphical interface to the informatics applications, making them easier to run compared to many open source versions that only have a command line interface.
Kerr says Apple was seeing its Workgroup Clusters with the Wolfram and Mathworks analysis routines installed and certified by someone else. So Apple decided to offer a pre-configured bundle for labs that want to run these applications on a high-performance cluster, yet do not want to build the cluster on their own.
Kerr notes the feedback Apple got from the science community was that “they wanted a [system] that would let them focus on their research and not on IT infrastructure,” says Kerr. “The average scientist has no time to put together and test a cluster.”
This led to this week’s announcement that Apple will now offer the distributed computing versions of Wolfram’s and Mathworks’ applications already installed and certified to run on the Workgroup Cluster.
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