Hi everyone,
I'm new in bioinformatics. I'm working in a clinical microbiology laboratory, and my chief wants to stablish a sequencing department for clinical and research purposes (whole genome sequencing for studying outbreaks, 16s metagenomics for studying microbiota, etc). We want to buy a desktop PC to do all this kind of bioinformatic analysis. For now, I'm using a VM in a laptop with W10, 8GB RAM, 512 GB SSD and Intel Core i7 7gen processor. I faced some memory issues in certain pipelines I run, and it´s time to move to a more powerful machine. Which specifications could you recommend me? I feel confident using a linux-VM in Windows, so I don't want to buy an apple/IOS machine for now.
I have read in other forums that It will be enough 16-32 GB of memory and 1-2 TB of storage...I'm scary about buying something that later doesn't fit our department needs.
I would appreciate your advise ;)
Thanks in advance!
Can you give some more details on the scale of what this department is going to be. Is it some smaller experiments from time to time or is this planned to be a facility that serves an entire hospital and external collaborators? Also, do you or anybody in the department has experience in handling and administrating large-scale sequencing projects and data volumes? Also, is there the hardware for secure backup of raw data?
Hi, sorry about not be as concrete as I should. Our goal is to support the needs of our clinical microbiology laboratory, therefore we would not have a constant activity on a large scale. None of us have broad experience in bioinformatics nor NGS (we about to finish the residency training program in clinical microbiology). Actually, our service doesn't have a DNA sequencer (we outsource the service). We only want to analyze raw sequencing data, in order to not to have to outsource the analysis too. We think it would be enough to buy one powerful computer to start...we can´t afford to build a workstation/cluster for now and we don't have enough informatic knowledge to do so.
I think you are getting a bit confused between IT requirement and bioinformatics here. It would be better to speak to someone in the local IT team who would be presumably managing the system you are going to purchase. They would be able to advise you on the data handling and backup strategy and solutions. It would also help if you would provide them with details about approx size of the data being produced/analysed per year. It is a pure infrastructure/IT based questions and it is not possible for many of us to address such specific questions on this forum.