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.




---