| What is BLAST |
BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) is a set of similarity search programs designed to explore all of the available sequence databases regardless of whether the query is protein or DNA. The BLAST programs have been designed for speed, with a minimal sacrifice of sensitivity to distant sequence relationships. The scores assigned in a BLAST search have a well-defined statistical interpretation, making real matches easier to distinguish from random background hits. BLAST uses a heuristic algorithm that seeks local as opposed to global alignments and is therefore able to detect relationships among sequences that share only isolated regions of
similarity.
mpiBLAST is a freely available, open-source, parallel implementation of NCBI BLAST. mpiBLAST takes advantage of distributed computational resources, i.e., a cluster, through explicit MPI communication and thereby utilizes all available resources unlike standard NCBI BLAST which can only take advantage of shared-memory multi-processors (SMPs).
The primary advantage to using mpiBLAST versus traditional NCBI BLAST is performance. mpiBLAST can increase performance by several orders of magnitude while still retaining identical results as output from NCBI BLAST. |
Other Australian HPC Centres where BLAST is installed
