Sun Microsystems has revealed its Fire Starter cluster for bioinformatics, a pre-configured hardware/software computing cluster aimed at small labs, clinical research organisations, departments within larger organisations, and other groups who have limited IT staffs and budgets.

Basically, the cluster is a scaled down version of a similar 32-node system Sun introduced last year. Sun found that for many labs, the 32-node system was overkill.

"Many scientists are dealing with severe space constraints and are tired of begging their IT guys to create a job, run a batch, or create a pipeline," said Loralyn Mears, Sun's market segment manager for life sciences. "The common needs are a system that can plug into a 120-volt outlet and takes very little space."

These criteria led to the development of the starter cluster for bioinformatics, a 50cm rack on rollers, designed to be rolled under a lab bench. The system has no special power or cooling requirements. According to Sun, the system plugs into a regular electrical power outlet and can operate in a lab, rather than in a data centre.

On the hardware side, the basic unit includes four nodes (eight processors). Sun offers several options for increasing the amount of processing power over time. For example, the system can be expanded to 32 nodes, and storage can be added as needed. Additionally, the starter cluster can be incorporated into an existing IT infrastructure or linked with other starter cluster systems.

The system includes pre-installed operating system software, message passing interface (MPI) software, Sun's N1 grid engine software for managing cluster resources, and Incogen's visual integrated bioinformatics environment (VIBE) software, used by life scientists to create and run bioinformatics data analysis workflows and data pipelining procedures.

Sun said it planned to ship the starter cluster with its BioBox CD of open source bioinformatics algorithms optimised for Linux and Solaris. The initial offering is a cluster running Linux on Intel's Xeon processors.