Regarding a New Project idea for Debian Med

[prakhar gaur <prakhar_aaidu16@hotmail.com>]

Dear All,

We want to have a Linux distribution based on Debian, dedicated for Bioinformatics research which would be useful for researchers and students. In India, high end hardware systems are at a premium, hence we want the distribution, to have low memory footprint. A variety of methods will be used to optimize the performance of the bioinformatics programs.

A few suggested methods to Optimize Performance:

1. Remove all the unnecessary packages(drivers) -- to make booting fast, to reduce size of the OS

2. File System -- like btrfs

3. A more efficient Kernel scheduler

4. Memory Management � eg. Bigmem

5. More aggressive package compilation

We want to have ours as a long term project. Finally we plan to test this distribution against other general purpose distributions like Fedora, CentOS and blends like Biopuppy, Biolinux (NERC) etc., using our own softwares.

Presently we are testing out other existing Distributions for Biology. The team working on this project consists of 3 students and one Faculty from our institute. As such none of us is from Computer Science background, so we read and learn as per the need.

We want this to be a part of the Debian � Med project, hence want your thoughts on this projects. Any ideas to improve or help is most welcome (and required).

Thanking You,

--
Prakhar Gaur
Student, Post Graduate Diploma in Bioinformatics,
Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology,
Biotech Park
Bangalore 560 100
India.

http://www.ibab.ac.in