Ok, so I am no expert on what is and what is not possible. However, I was thinking about uses for the thunderbolt port on the 2011 MBP I am expecting any day now.
I do bioinformatics and one of the things that can have an impact on genome assemblies is I/O so we have been utilizing PCIe SSDs (such as those from Fusion IO). Now assembly is generally a high memory/high CPU requirement so these cards live on our core servers. But we have lots of uses for fast storage, so I started looking into external PCIe card trays. Lots of these exist for servers as 1,2,4U expansion racks but I did find this for a desktop solution. This currently uses an Expresscard module which could be used with the MBP but I think this is a perfect example of what could be done with the thunderbolt port. This would be similar to the Little Big Disk but would would be more customizable. In fact, why think of it only as for storage, why not consider adding GPUs for computation using something like CUDA or driving displays. The real power would come from having space for more than one PCIe card (they have these already). This would allow you to raid the cards together (for storage cards). This may saturate the bandwidth for the thunderbolt as it stands now but the future specs might allow for all kinds of permutations.
Just thought I might share my thoughts.
Cheers, Mav
I do bioinformatics and one of the things that can have an impact on genome assemblies is I/O so we have been utilizing PCIe SSDs (such as those from Fusion IO). Now assembly is generally a high memory/high CPU requirement so these cards live on our core servers. But we have lots of uses for fast storage, so I started looking into external PCIe card trays. Lots of these exist for servers as 1,2,4U expansion racks but I did find this for a desktop solution. This currently uses an Expresscard module which could be used with the MBP but I think this is a perfect example of what could be done with the thunderbolt port. This would be similar to the Little Big Disk but would would be more customizable. In fact, why think of it only as for storage, why not consider adding GPUs for computation using something like CUDA or driving displays. The real power would come from having space for more than one PCIe card (they have these already). This would allow you to raid the cards together (for storage cards). This may saturate the bandwidth for the thunderbolt as it stands now but the future specs might allow for all kinds of permutations.
Just thought I might share my thoughts.
Cheers, Mav
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