Is Dell Precision mobile workstation suitable for bioinformatics/NGS analysis

Question

[tarekzakaria.badr]

Hey everyone,

Since i am moving a lot i was looking to get a mobile workstation to do some initial script editing while traveling and trying with few samples before applying it to the whole projects. The data we are dealing with are mostly RNAseq, and some tumor exome seq samples. some other chipseq or other data may come from time to time. After searching around the mobile workstation i got in mind is the Dell Precision 7530 with the following specs:-

Intel Core Xeon E-2186M Prozessor, 6 cores
RAM:64 GB, 4 x 16 GB, DDR4 2666 MHz SDRAM, 4 DIMMS, No ECC
Harddisk: M.2-PCIe-NVMe-SSD, 256 GB+ HD 2 TB
OS: Ubuntu Linux 16.04

Would you think that is a suitable configuration for my purposes, and would it be enough to do a couple of exomes/Rnaseq samples in a reasonable time?

[grant.hovhannisyan]

For playing around with data its fine, but with 2 TB you might feel limited in close future.

[Charles Warden]

If your lab has a shared network folder, maybe the hard drive space isn't a huge issue. For example, I'm guessing sequencing reads are originally being saved in a place that is accessible to your lab and/or institute compute resources (not just your local computer)?

For example, you'll need to have a backup someone (if questions are asked after your paper is published), and you'll ideally have public code/data prepared with your paper :)

Answer 1

[Devon Ryan]

As long as you're not trying to run large analyses on the machine then that should certainly suffice for the vast majority of projects. Just make sure you have access to something with more cores when you need to process whole projects, since that's what's really going to be the limiter.

[tarekzakaria.badr]

Thanks for your feedback. My idea is to run 2-3 samples (Human exome or RNAseq) per time just to be able to modify the scripts before running them on a cloud or something, and also to be able to handle R easier when dealing with large files. Do you think The ECC ram would make a big difference? because it's available also in ECC but with quite a price difference?

[Devon Ryan]

I think your specs are totally fine for what you describe. Since you're using this for pilot testing stuff I wouldn't blow your budget on ECC memory.

Answer 2

[GenoMax]

a mobile workstation to do some initial script editing while traveling and trying with few samples before applying it to the whole projects.

I think people missed the point that this is a laptop (these mobile workstations have come closer to being almost as portable as normal laptops) so it would be an overkill for just script editing. Only reason it would be needed is to have access to 64G RAM (normal laptops are likely going to top out at 16-32GB DDR4 RAM).

Lenovo's P series workstations can have 128G RAM and 6 TB of storage for a price north of $5K. Essential if you do CAD/CAM models for a living.