Entering edit mode
8.4 years ago
Darth Winter
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0
Is it possible to run NGS analysis on a core i3 laptop only? If not, will it be advisable for me to buy a separate hard disk for the NGS analysis only to sort of compensate with the speed during the analysis?
Much of NGS analysis is limited by RAM. The CPU only affects time.
That said, laptops are not ideal if you are processing large amounts of data. If you plan to do this routinely, I'd advise investing in a powerful computer, or running analyses on a compute cluster. Though of course it depends on what, exactly, you are doing :)
Brian has already pretty much hit all the main points. I suggest looking Amazon EC2 servers, and the Galaxy project.
Thank you for the replies! :)
Are you saying that my laptop will be able to run NGS analysis but on a slower pace? Do I have to expect crashes during the analysis? I am not planning to do this routinely, only for my thesis regarding whole genome sequencing. Also, I have 4GB of RAM. Would that be okay? Or would you suggest that I upgrade my RAM? The RAM is the only thing that I could think of upgrading for now, not my computer since I still could not afford to buy a new one.
Thank you also for suggesting Amazon EC2 servers and the Galaxy project. I will study them because I am relatively new with bioinformatics. :)
Depends on what you call the analysis. If you start with raw reads it's not going to be enough RAM, if you start further downstream it might be sufficient.
How much RAM would you recommend?
Minimum of 8 GB for aligners such as BWA. For others (e.g. STAR with human genome need ~30G RAM). So beyond some basic analysis you are going to to find a normal laptop limiting. Hopefully you are not thinking of doing this using windows, since most software (some exceptions of Java based programs, R etc) will not work there.