Jennifer Steinbachs and Kathleen Pryer were recently notified by Sun Microsystems that their Academic Equipment Grant was approved. With this grant, Sun will be donating a mid-range workstation, the UltraSPARC 10, for use in small computational biology projects. Receipt of this workstation will mark the beginning of serious large-scale data analysis at the Field Museum, to be followed soon by the purchase of similar high-performance computers with recently awarded NSF funds from the Major Research Instrumentation Program. Together these will form the core of a long-awaited computer cluster at the Museum for the analysis of molecular data. As the amount of biological data increases exponentially, computational biologists play an increasingly integral role in the analysis of those data sets in an attempt to ensure that researchers have the most useful computational tools, both hardware and software, for their needs.