Jackie Vogel
What Yeast Can Teach Us
All the snapshots are processed with Volocity, an image and data analysis software application by Improvision. The graphics-intensive software suite was written to take advantage of the PowerPC G5 processor and is at the core of Vogel’s all-Mac system.
Fast, Reliable Storage Infrastructure
Vogel, a longtime Mac user, knew exactly what to do when she was asked to build a microscopy lab at McGill. “When I heard about Mac OS X and started using it, I decided that I was going to make my lab a Mac lab,” she says. She knew that Macs were reliable, fast and user friendly and that Mac OS X would allow researchers in her lab to focus on their research, not system administration. “Mac OS X has really revolutionized the way things happen in my lab,” says Vogel.
Data can pile up pretty fast around Vogel’s lab. Her team needed a scalable system that could handle an ever-expanding mountain of data. Xsan storage networks can easily grow to include new Xserve RAIDs without having to bring the storage offline. When an Xserve RAID is added, students and researchers in Vogel’s lab would simply see a larger network volume. She also knew that the Mac OS X’s UNIX core would provide a stable platform for the advanced scientific research applications used for microscopy imaging like Volocity.
Vogel set up two Xserve G5 servers, four 5.6TB Xserve RAID units and half a dozen Power Mac G5 desktop systems, then linked them together with Fibre Channel through a QLogic SANBox 5200 16-port Fibre Channel switch. The McGill biology department now has more than 22 terabytes of storage capacity and its researchers can shuttle files between machines with no network lag.
“Mac OS X has really revolutionized the way things happen in my lab.”
To cut the expense of licensing fees, Vogel runs Volocity software management tools on an Xserve G5. The application is served out to researchers in packages based on need. “Any number of users can log in and use one of the eight different Volocity configurations,” says Vogel. “We’ve set the software packages up in bundles. If somebody’s not doing anything that requires really sophisticated three-dimensional rendering, we don’t give them the rendering software. We give them the straight deconvolution package that will interface with the analysis package.”
Vogel can track how her team uses the software from her workstation via Apple Remote Desktop 2. With Apple Remote Desktop 2, she can easily manage and deploy the Volocity application from virtually any Mac with an Internet connection without interrupting client systems. She can also set network, energy saver and date and time system preferences on any Mac in her network and keep track of how people in her lab use their machines. With a few mouse clicks, she can monitor more than 200 attributes of each individual computer, from hard disk use to monitor settings.
SAN Administration for Scientists
Vogel is not a system administrator. Still, she was able to configure the Xsan and Xserve RAIDs using Mac OS X server tools, a feat that would’ve been difficult with most SAN systems. “The ease of getting the whole thing up and running is just unbelievable,” she says. “I find that certain types of companies really try to make it into a black box. They try to make it a mystery so that you would need them for certain things. I found that by going the Apple route, there’s no mystery, everything’s there.”
Vogel’s graduate students have easy access to their research tools. “They can really move files around easily; they can talk to other computers; they can make use of the server that we have and the SAN,” she says. “Everything is set up very nicely for them and they’re very productive.” The students still do some work on PCs, but they prefer Macs. “When they’re forced to use a PC because of some software package, it puts them out of their stride,” says Vogel.
Looking Ahead
Vogel hopes that her research with yeast will yield information that will help doctors battle cancer. “A yeast cell is a very simple example of what any cell has to do when it has to segregate its DNA,” she says. “And when it doesn’t happen properly — this is part of what happens in cancer. Yeast gives us a very elegant and very simple model for understanding how cells report defects in essential processes and how they resolve them by repairing or delaying the cell response cycle.”
Knowing how normal cells function could lead to new cancer treatments. “Our philosophy is that you have to understand the normal process to understand the abnormal process.”
McGill’s innovative and easy-to-use Mac microscopy lab is the ideal setting to cultivate creative solutions to the scientific roadblocks that stand between biologists and a true understanding of cell division.