Discontinuation of the old network blast server

[Tom Madden]

                Discontinuation of the old network blast server
                        effective March 1, 2000


        This message announces the discontinuation of the old network BLAST
server (for BLAST version 1.4) effective March 1, 2000.   This change will 
NOT affect the NCBI Web pages, Email server, GCG connection, blastcl3 client, 
PowerBlast in Sequin, or MacVector at release 6.5.3 and above.   This change 
will affect blastcl2, blastcli, PowerBlast outside of Sequin and MacVector 
not yet upgraded to 6.5.3.

        Currently the old network BLAST service accounts for less than 3% of
all BLAST jobs performed at the NCBI.  The newest NCBI BLAST search engine 
(version 2.0) was written from scratch to handle the new challenges posed 
by the increasing size and complexity of the sequence databases in the coming years.  
Updates to this software will continue.

        The NCBI BLAST Web page may be reached at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/

        Blastcl3 should be used instead of previous clients such as blastcl2, 
blastcli, and PowerBlast.  Blastcl2 and blastcli do not produce gapped alignments 
at all; PowerBlast performs the gapped computation on the user machine, instead of 
the NCBI server.  Blastcl3 may be obtained at ftp://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/network/netblast

        Please send questions and comments about this change to
blast-help at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.