Hello!

I am Alberto, a postdoc from the DNA replication group in Imperial College (London). I know that this has been discussed in before but with the upcoming release of the new GPU ready Relion it seems that the time for buying a new system has come and we still have a few questions. Maybe you will be able to help :)

In the lab we mainly work with protein complexes that are around 1 million Dalton or a bit bigger, and in our latest reconstructions we have used with around 300K particles (sorted from a 1.2 million particle pool) to reach around 3.9A resolution. For this we have been using a cluster but we wonder if, with the new Relion version, it would be possible to move the task to a single workstation. There are different options:

a) gaming computer with an I7 (10 cores) and up to 128GB of RAM; this machine would have 4 GTX 1080 cards. This option would be the cheapest, something like 5 o 6K should do it, but we cannot increase the RAM any further, in fact, 128GB is already a bit over the top.

b) workstation with a single xeon or a couple of CPUs. With this we could go up to 36 cores, 1TB of RAM and the same 4 cards or higher. However, it would be expensive. Actually, the starting configuration with a single 16 core xeon and 128GB of RAM plus the cards would go for around 10K

c) we could continue using a cluster and try to something like Amazon cloud, or a similar solution that offers GPU acceleration. Has anybody tried this?

d) We could go for any other approach that you recommend, like pilling a few gaming computers and build our own cluster from them.

Any advice will be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Alberto