I worked in bioinformatics at a Max Planck Institute during my studies, and made good use of a Mac Pro. Some of the tools we used were interactive, such as 3D-m

I worked in bioinformatics at a Max Planck Institute during my studies, and made good use of a Mac Pro. Some of the tools we used were interactive, such as 3D-modelling. Many other tasks, such as DNA sequence searches (BLAST), just happened to involve datasets that were too large for most notebooks, but manageable with the 32GB or RAM the Mac Pro had. We did use a compute cluster, but using it drastically reduced the turnaround time during development in my experience.