Wrapping up BLAST and other applications for use on Unix clusters.
We have developed two programs that speed up common bioinformatic applications by spreading them across a UNIX cluster.(1) BLAST.pm, a new module for the 'MOLLUSC' package. (2) WRAPID, a simple tool for parallelizing large numbers of small instances of programs such as BLAST, FASTA and CLUSTALW.


BACKGROUND
The packages were developed in Perl on a 20-node Linux cluster and are provided together with a configuration script and documentation. They can be freely downloaded from http://wolfe.gen.tcd.ie/wrapper.
Hokamp
Karsten
K
Department of Genetics, University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland. karsten@oscar.gen.tcd.ie
Shields
Denis C
DC
Wolfe
Kenneth H
KH
Caffrey
Daniel R
DR
D003195:Computer Communication Networks; D003199:Computer Systems; D003205:Computing Methodologies; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D011786:Quality Control; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software