What laptop specifications should I consider as a Bioinformatics PhD student with HPC access?

Question

[Tundup]

I'm a Bioinformatics PhD student with access to high-performance computing (HPC) and high-spec computers for intensive tasks. My work involves machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) model building using single-cell data.

I'm looking for a personal laptop with good specifications, probably for day to day laptop doable task encountered by bioinformatics PhD student.

I am not sure for what task I can use personal laptop in my PhD.

I want light weight laptop. How about Macbook Air series. Or, any other?

Answer 1

[i.sudbery]

A MacBook Air, or any of the lightweight business focused PC options (Lenovo Carbon, Latitude 7xxx or 9xxx, HP EliteBook) is absolutely fine for using as a dumb terminal to HPC, for coding and for general productivity. For model testing and data visualisation you might want make sure you are well supplied with RAM. Definitely not less than 16GB, 32Gb would be preferable.