Daily Life in an Ivory Basement

Over New Years I ordered 2 Dell PowerEdge T300 servers with 24 gb of RAM for $1500 each. I had no interest in upgrading with Dell's overly expensive hard drives, so I ordered them both with the minimum of 2x160gb drives, leaving two slots bare.

I then went to newegg and ordered 4x1.5 tb hard drives, and a week or two later got an additional 5x2 tb hard drives.

This left with me with too many hard drives for the slots, so into the bargain I added an Addonics MST5X1PM Mini Storage tower, a standalone box capable of holding four hard drives and connecting to a host via an eSATA 5x1 port multiplier. I also had to get an Addonics ADS3GX4R5-E PCI card and a 3 ft eSATA cable from Newegg (OK3EAR) -- tip, get the 6 foot cable.

I then stuffed the four 160gb hard drives that Dell shipped in their servers into it, hooked it up to one of my Debian-installed T300 servers, and voila! Four extra hard drives! JBOD FTW!

(I'm not used to stuff like this Just Working on Linux, and so far I really like the Addonics tower, so I thought I'd post about both.)

The PCI card has 4 open ports, too, so I could in theory add three more storage towers. But then the I/O would suck even more.

Pointers to equally good or better JBOD SATA 3.5" enclosure options are very welcome.

--titus

p.s. On the other hand, I have a failure rate of over 50% on the hard drives from newegg. WTF?

The National Science Foundation just announced that the BEACON Science and Technology Center centered at Michigan State University was just funded. BEACON stands for "Bio/computational Evolution in Action Consortium" - you can check out the Web site here.

In my own nutshell, BEACON is focused on studying the evolution of organization across multiple scales -- from genomic and cellular, to multicellular, to inter-multicellular (a.k.a. social) -- using techniques from experimental evolution, modeling, and digital life systems.

BEACON is a project nucleated by a long-time collaboration between the Lenski Experimental Evolution Lab and the Devolab, parts of which grew out of a summer undergraduate research project (Avida!) that Charles Ofria and I did under Chris Adami's supervision in 1993.

I feel old.

The practical consequences are pretty cool.

First, it means that MSU (and our partner institutions, too -- see below) has money explicitly for supporting students doing really sexy interdisciplinary work combining computation and biology. This is the kind of work that has been reasonably hard to find funding for, especially as it gets less and less connected to, ahem, reality. So we're looking for really awesome students that don't fit in a nice, neat academic box. (How often do you hear that?? ;)

Don't like Michigan? Well, that's fine -- BEACON is a collaboration between MSU, U. Idaho, UT Austin, UW Seattle, and North Carolina A&T. Drop me a line and I can put you in touch with PIs at your favorite graduate school.

It also means that I am being recruited to teach a course on bringing biologists to computational science. This should have positive effects on the state of the Software Carpentry notes, for one. It also means more biologists being brought into the light of Python, for another. Good? I think so ;)

Finally, it means I will probably be thinking about an even wider range of research and research activities in my lab. If you're thinking about starting grad school in 2011, check out BEACON in general and my lab in particular -- I'm interested in

• evolution of gene regulation in artificial systems
• understanding evolutionary signals of information gain in genomes
• evolution of vertebrate complexity

and more.

--titus

A new meme was born at PyCon 2010: The Testing Goat.

Or, "Be Stubborn. Obey the Goat."

The goat actually emerged from the Testing In Python Birds of a Feather session at PyCon, where Terry Peppers used slides full of goat in his introduction. This was apparently an overreaction to lolcat, but the testing goat is now being held up in opposition to the Django pony.

sigh.

--titus