I am writing in Mathematica on a laptop with an Intel i7 and 16 gigs of RAM. What happens (guessing in general) to the speed of my programs (genomics) if I:
Throw $20,000 at the problem and go to a Unix workstation?
Run in compiled c rather than Mathematica? (That would make me unhappy!)
For those of you who have been through this yourself, what did you do?
I was thinking that the system would need to be sold (used) about every 2 years with purchase of a new computer to stay at a “sweet spot” on price and performance. Are there companies that will lease with that in mind?
What is the value of extra speed? I would profile the code and find the fraction that uses 90% of the cpu. Can your task be parallelized? It’s instructive to Parallelize[] and see the elapsed time drop (and watch all 4 cores get busy). That’s just with the Home Edition.
I’d throw money at improving what I had. Are you thinking of a fully supported system or a Linux offshoot? I see it as potentially taking more personal time than the processing time you want to save.
I think you are correct to say to stay with what I have and use Parallelize[]. My DNA work linearly progresses through sequence, so it can be divided by ranges of sequence number.
With appropriate licensing, do you know if Parallelize[] will run over a LAN with a bank of several other inexpensive computers?
Some genomics programs written from scratch and running on a batch of $500 computers might make for a good SBIR, unless the license from Wolfram is huge.