Bioinformatics on Solaris x64

by Dr. Brian Fristensky, Department of Plant Science, University of Manitoba

An enormous number of computational tools exist for most tasks in bioinformatics, including DNA and protein sequence analysis, mining of gene expression data, pattern detection and recognition.  Many of these programs have been developed on the Solaris Sparc platform. The expansion of Solaris to the 64-bit AMD Opteron processor (x64) potentially offers new choices for the implementation of bioinformatics infrastructure. However, users in any specialized field will not move to a new hardware platform until the applications on which they depend are available on that platform. To make the problem more complex, x64 servers and workstations will typically be added to existing systems which already include Solaris-Sparc and/or Linux-Intel machines. This article describes how these problems have been addressed in the BIRCH bioinformatics system.