mpiBLAST is an MPI based parallel implementation
of NCBI BLAST. It 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.
