mpiBLAST is an MPI based parallel implementation of NCBI BLAST. The project consists of 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.
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