There’s a new story posted on the Apple Science & Technology Web site that highlights Michael Love’s work at Cornell University.
Love is a protein crystallography researcher using a Power Mac G4 mini-cluster. He also founded the GNU-Darwin project to bring open-source research tools to the Mac platform.
In the past, Love conducted much of his protein crystallography research on Unix workstations because of their parallel processing abilities though he’s always preferred Mac. But now that Mac OS X is here, he can harness the power of Unix and the intuitiveness of the Mac on one platform.
“I’m a longtime Mac user and also somewhat of a Unix aficionado,” Love says in the SciTech article. “With the availability of Mac OS X, I can do everything on my preferred computer — the Mac.”
In his lab, he runs two dual-processor Power Mac G4s as a parallel processing mini-cluster. At home, he has an iBook and another Power Mac G4.
Love uses his Power Mac G4 mini-cluster for solving protein structures, crystallographic refinement, molecular modeling and building, and publication-quality molecular graphics production. Key applications on the Mac such as CNS, PyMOL and CCP4 provide a comprehensive tool set for his research.