“I rate my Macs for the fact I can have the best of UNIX and Mac OS X running together”, says Dr Tighe. “They are very reliable and, of course, I get a beautiful user interface”.

One priority of the system was to secure the in-house ability to print and analyse DNA microarrays — the visual representation of gene activity. Such arrays require a great deal of storage space. The Workgroup Cluster provides this and gives users secure remote access to their microarray information from any computer. Meanwhile, on the analysis side, the university now has the capacity to carry out its own BLAST searches rather than relying on external computing resources.

“Our researchers and students have said there’s been a dramatic increase in the speed of analyses achieved by the new system, and that alone has made it worth the investment”, says Dr Tighe. “Anyone can log onto the server, put their search up and leave the Workgroup to get on with it”. Nottingham researchers can also customise their BLAST searches to gain more relevant results with less administrative work.

If Dr Tighe’s department is anything to go by, Apple is fast becoming the platform of choice for bioinformatics research. All research students are issued with their own iBooks when they join the research group, while staff colleagues have PowerBooks configured to their individual requirements. The department also runs a number of Power Mac G4s, as well as an increasing number of Mac minis, which are helping to reduce the footprint of the technology resources. The Workgroup Cluster is intended for use across campus, accessible from laptops, desktops, PCs and Linux-based systems. Dr Tighe is happy to report all these machines interface smoothly with the Workgroup.

“Our researchers and students have said there’s been a dramatic increase in the speed of analyses achieved by the new system, and that alone has made it worth the investment.”

“The system has been immensely stable”, he says, “We will put a lot more software on the cluster, but I want to wait and see which tasks we want to accelerate before I give the system more to do. We need to make sure we’re using the best equipment and resources for the tasks that will be most valuable to our academic staff and research students”.

Although the system currently supports in excess of 100 users, Dr Tighe is not certain exactly how many users he has or even what they are doing. His approach has been to give as many academic staff as possible access the resource, and respond to user feedback when necessary.

Dr Tighe’s assessment of Apple’s Workgroup Cluster is that it has delivered an invaluable resource to the university and one that will give benefits in the future: “Together with BioTeam iNquiry, the Apple solution has increased the speed of our work by a considerable amount”, he says. “We wanted a system we could configure for our own purposes — something that gave us the power we need to carry out analyses, but that stayed under our control. In the future, I hope to buy more Xserves to expand the solution and bring even more power to our researchers”.