A while back in a very neat demonstration of the portable coding approach Dotmatics released ElementalDB for the iPad an iPad application that does a substructure search of a 1,200,000 Chembl structure database in less than a second. Well now they have gone even further and ported their data visualisation tool Vortex to the raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi is a $35 credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and keyboard. It is used in electronics projects and for many of the functions usually assigned to a desktop PC such as spreadsheets, word-processing and games.  It features a 700MHz ARM processor and can run a Debian Linux derived operating system. Compiling Vortex on this platform took just a few minutes as it involved building upon Oracle’s JDK 7 which was recently released for the Pi.