Submission to bionet.biology.computational

[Peter S. Shenkin]

In article <34333 at mimsy.umd.edu> comp-bio at genbank.bio.net writes:
>My question is:  In your opinion, what would make an ideal computer system
>for your research efforts in terms of performance, ease of use,
>accessibility, hardware and software, etc.?

Could you please tell us what you mean by a biocomputation lab?  Biocomputation
is diverse as:

	refining x-ray structures (FP-numerical)
	2D image processing (FP-numerical)
	sequence searching and alignment 
	  (database / integer operations / statistics)
	molecular dynamics / monte carlo / E-minimization (FP-numerical)
	molecular graphics (graphics / software engineering)
	3D reconstruction & tomography (FP-numerical, graphics)
	ecosystem modeling (finite element / FP-numerical)
	protein structure prediction (FP-numerical / neural nets
          / massive parallelization)
	etc., etc.

I contend that biocomputation is nearly as broad a field as computation in
general.  Each of the above topics has its own SPECIFIC requirements;  I've
tried to indicate in parentheses a few computational "key words" pertinent to
each of these areas.  Neither the overall list nor the key-word list is
exhaustive.

Just what do you mean when you say "biocomputation"?  I asked you that by
personal electronic mail when you first posted your request, but although
you thanked me for some other advice I enclosed, you never answered the 
question.  As posed, the term "biocomputation lab" is too poorly defined to 
allow a meaningful reply.  I do molecular graphics and protein structure
prediction, and my needs are completely different from those of someone 
searching a gene bank.

	-P.
************************f*u*cn*rd*ths*u*cn*gt*a*gd*jb**************************
Peter S. Shenkin, Department of Chemistry, Barnard College, New York, NY  10027
(212)854-1418  shenkin at cunixf.cc.columbia.edu(Internet)  shenkin at cunixf(Bitnet)
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