<p>I'm involved in establishing a new bioinformatics lab. It will serve primarily for teaching purporses, but I think it is possible to design small grid as well. 
The idea is to have 15-20 desktop computers, 4-8 cores each, and build grid using half of the cores. The budget is ~30k Euros. Probably, some network file system (NFS) will be needed as well.
Can you share yours experience in that matter? Or maybe you have some suggestions of ready solutions? Or is it better to buy cheaper desktops and invest saved money into 2-3 very strong workstations?</p>

<p>What I experienced so far in Bioinformatics labs, can be divided into 2 solutions:</p>

<p><li> all data stored in network file system (NFS) and computer clients loading everything from NFS. Independent cluster uses the same NFS. It has advantage of easy back-ups, and unified system. But the users have limited privileges and have to ask for every piece of software. Unfortunately, in case of troubles with NFS, no one can work at all:/
<li> the client computers store data locally, but there is NFS, mainly for cluster and back-up purposes</p>

<p>I'm awaiting yours comments.</p>

<p>Populating 15+ separate desktops with a number of bioinfo packages does not seem right to me. While it is doable, you would need something like cfengine or Chef to automate everything.<br />
</p>
<p>You have many options when it comes to exporting particular directories from NFS server, from everything (remote booting of clients) through /biosoft and /home dirs, or just  /biosoft. So some work can be done during NFS failure assuming you got the basic tools in your /home dir.</p>
<p>Given a choice I would go with dumb and cheap clients (but with enough RAM and swap &amp; /tmp) and few servers with a lot of RAM / cores. Some stuff (i.e. genome/transcriptome assembly) hardly works, if at all, on low RAM machines. </p>
<p>If you are concerned about NFS failures then you may go with RAID and mirrored NFS servers.</p>