What is ideas Laptop configuration for running Phylogenetics software - (Aug/19/2013 )

Hello,

    What is ideas Laptop configuration for running Phylogenetics softwares. If I want to run phylogenetics with large data sets what configuration of laptop is needed? Is 4GB RAM ok or I should go for more. thanks.

I'd say the faster and the more RAM the better. But it really depends on software, data type and data size...for some types of data e.g. large sets of long sequences you want to align even the fastest desktop might be too slow and you have to use the university's central computing facilities with "super computers".

I don't know much about but some software like *BEAST or Ugene can use CUDA technology from some Nvidia graphic cards to improve calculation times with some GPU-accelerated algorithms. Others can use OpenCL for better computing. Also, multi-core CPU improve performance and allow multi-thread computing.

In any case, for large datasets you can use CIPRES server online facilities.