Not a day goes by without someone, somewhere turning to Macs for what they can offer in terms of operability, reliability, computing speed and so on. Everyone who hasn't switched yet to the Mac, however, complains about the high price one has to pay to get a decent Apple system. Not professor Gary Green. The man has opted to make a £300,000 investment in Apple technology, on behalf of The University of York's Neuroimaging Centre.

"We wanted a high-performance computing system that could cope with many potential users and fast turnarounds," professor Gary Green, director of the Centre, said. "In the past, processing jobs could take weeks, and yet much of the analysis is fine grained and very repetitive, so we were looking for a system that could handle large data sets in parallel."

OK, so far so good. But this is only one of the reasons why a Neuroimaging Centre such as the one at the University of York needs. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Sun technology were all tested with a fixed set of criteria. Brain-imaging software was tested on each and every one them, including Matlab, Atlas, Maple, Brainstorm, Neurolens, Brainvoyager and MPI. Each OS was also put to the test for security, back-up and support, future-proofing and upgrade paths, while contingency planning and cost were the last of the criteria used for the final choice. And since Macs rank high on every one of these aspects "Apple won hands down," said Green. "It was the fastest and easily the cheapest option in storage, back-up and computing," the professor confidently stated.

Green expects user demand to increase, saying they'll be expanding the adoption of Macs even further. He added that the University is looking to support a wider group of users including "a Europe-wide database", but also to introduce support for "external users and to create links to external grids." Green believes that "Apple has been a good choice for [them]" and that it won't "compromise... future development."

"The support we received was good and there was a clear path in what Apple was doing with software," professor Green concluded.