Software

• mpiBLAST-PIO: mpiBLAST-PIO is a highly efficient, parallel I/O capable extension of mpiBLAST, which is an open source parallelization of NCBI BLAST. mpiBLAST is widely used in daily biological research as it can significantly speedup BLAST searches by fitting large sequence databases into the aggregate memory of cluster nodes. However, traditional versions of mpiBLAST have performance limitations in handling BLAST queries that generate large volume of output. With the help of parallel I/O and a set of output processing optimizations, mpiBLAST-PIO dramatically improves the scalability and efficiency of mpiBLAST in searching expensive BLAST queries. The optimizations used in mpiBLAST-PIO are based on the technical paper "Efficient Data Access for Parallel BLAST" published at the 19th International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (http://www.ipdps.org).