Chu-Young Kim wrote:
Hello everyone,
I have not done much crystallography in the past five years but I'm
trying to get back into it now because we stumbled upon a very
interesting enzyme. It seems a lot has changed in the computer
hardware world. I was trained on an SGI back in graduate school. What
kind of hardware should I purchase to run all the popular
crystallography software? Also, which operating system will give me
the least headache? We are basically starting from scratch. Our
department has a new Bruker machine and an older Rigaku we can use.
Any advice you may have will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance
for your comments.
Chu-Young Kim
Almost any kind of recent PC equipped with a Linux distribution and a
discrete graphics card capable of 3D acceleration is a cost-effective
solution. You don't need much of a machine to run rings around the most
powerful SGIs. I'm running Fedora Core 6 with an bunch of aging Pentium
4 single core CPU workstations equipped with NVidia Quadro 980XGL
graphics cards. If you don't need stereo, any lower-end GeForce Nvidia
graphics card has plenty of horsepower. The biggest headache with Linux
is getting all the hardware to play together nicely, and tracking down
dependencies for third-party software. It's not that hard to do, just
time-consuming. I transitioned from RedHat 9 to Fedora Core 6 within the
last year, and there were a number of little issues that had to be
addressed to get everything running just right. Once running, Linux
workstations are trouble-free and dependable.
You can do a lot in Windows now, but it is slooooooooow compared to
Linux, scripting is awkward, and not everything is available in Windows
versions. If you go with Linux, strongly consider an NVidia graphics
card. ATI cards have been more problematic to configure satisfactorily.
As always, YMMV.
Cheers,
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roger S. Rowlett
Professor
Colgate University Presidential Scholar
Department of Chemistry
Colgate University
13 Oak Drive
Hamilton, NY 13346
tel: (315)-228-7245
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fax: (315)-228-7935
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
