Modeling a Portable Solar Mini Cluster for Field Data Analysis

Methods

Summary

The project can be separated into two parts, one, the building of a working prototype and, two the testing of the prototype.

Building the prototype will consist of the acquisition of the parts required, the design of any custom parts needed, the installation of Operating Systems, the installation of cluster management software, like OGE (open grid scheduler). We intend to install front-end tools to interact with the device, one of the driving aspects of this project is to have any scientist be able to use the device so a application like Galaxy or Yabi will be installed on the device.

Testing the device will be done with common bioinformatics tasks, like gene mapping and QC we'll use software like STAR, BAMqc and FastQC to do this, running on common datasets, and compared to other available computational hardware.

We consider the project done when benchmarks have been created for the device.

Challenges

The number one risk in a project like this is a risk of completion, will the creators of the project be able to complete the project on time, clear goals, methods and targets are the counter to such an obstacle. We expect that the project will take 80 days after being funded, we have clearly defined roles, goals, and expectations.

Pre Analysis Plan

Because the device will be tested against other computational hardware we hope to be able to draw some conclusions about the computational usefulness of the device. The device is not expected to be as fast as a power hungry bet-in-class computational machine, but the device should be powerful enough to complete common scientific computation in a reasonable amount of time, something that a comparison should be able to pull out.