birgHPC (Bioinformatic Research Group High Performance Computing) is a free Linux Live CD distribution based on PelicanHPC and Debian Live.
The idea of creating birgHPC comes from the fact that most PCs in the computer laboratories are under utilised. The students, for example, only use the computer laboratories during the day but after office hours and especially during holidays, these PCs are idle. These PCs can provide valuable computing resources to researchers by simply converting them into a high performance computing cluster. Conventional cluster setup, however, is troublesome and lengthy, involving manual software configurations and installations and not to mention extra budget. birgHPC aims to simplify these by using Linux Live CD technology, combining with automated configurations and built-in software. The main feature of birgHPC is the ability to convert PCs interconnected within the same private local area network (LAN) to a high performance computing cluster, specifically for molecular dynamics studies, using just one CD. Other features included in birgHPC are the Ganglia cluster monitoring, the auto slots detection, both OpenMPI and MPICH2 capabilities as well as tools for molecular dynamics (GROMACS, Grace, DSSP, VMD and PyMol) and bioinformatics (mpiBLAST and ClustalW-MPI).
If you use birgHPC in your work, please cite us:
Teong Han Chew, Kwee Hong Joyce-Tan, Farizuwana Akma and Mohd Shahir Shamsir. birgHPC: creating instant computing clusters for bioinformatics and molecular dynamics. Bioinformatics. Volume 27, Issue 9. pp 1320-1321.
doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btr109
