Don’t let the realityof GC×GC-MS data burst your bubble! (James Harynuk, MDCW 2024)

🎤 Presenter: James Harynuk, Broderick Wood (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)

💾 PDF presentation

💡 Book in your calendar: 16th Multidimensional Chromatography Workshop (MDCW) 3 - 5. February 2025

Abstract

Getting funding for a new GC×GC-MS system or two is super exciting! However, finding the funds and picking out the right chromatography hardware option for your needs is where your expertise as a chromatographer and scientist likely ends. You get computers to run the instruments and collect data provided by the vendor. Then the onslaught of data bursts your bubble as the reality of a busy GC×GC-MS lab sinks in.

Maybe the computer collecting the data from the instrument cannot handle the onslaught. Maybe your students are losing or misplacing portable drives or wiping data they thought they’d backed up. Maybe the computer you bought to process the data can process a couple of files but then things get super bogged down and slow, maybe it cannot even open the files, or maybe it can process and align the files, but the processing is too slow or impossible at the scale that you need. You have met the “minimum requirements” from the vendors, so what’s wrong? Where should you spend money to boost performance to an acceptable level? In this presentation, we dive into the nitty gritty of networking, storage, computer specs, processing performance, and attempt to answer the main question: how and where do I spend my money to get a solution that makes it easy to manage and protect my data, and where should I spend money when investing in new computers for crunching data?

*may also apply to LC×LC-MS etc too.