The mpiBLAST team anounces the release of mpiBLAST, an MPI based parallel
implementation of NCBI BLAST. mpiBLAST is a pair of programs that replace
formatdb and blastall with versions that execute BLAST jobs in parallel on
a cluster of computers with MPI installed. There are two primary
advantages to using mpiBLAST versus traditional BLAST. First, mpiBLAST
splits the database across each node in the cluster. Because each node's
segment of the database is smaller it can usually reside in the
buffer-cache, yielding a significant speedup due to the elimination of
disk I/O. Second, it allows BLAST users to take advantage of efficient,
low-cost Beowulf clusters because interprocessor communication demands
are low. mpiBLAST achieves super-linear speedup in situations where the
database is too large to fit into RAM, and near linear speedup in other
situations. It does not require a dedicated cluster.
The software and further information are available at
http://mpiblast.lanl.gov/
We look forward to hearing from you with questions, comments, and
bugfixes.
Regards,
The mpiBLAST Team.
