title: PAR: a PARallel and distributed job crusher.
abstract: Bioinformaticians are tackling increasingly computation-intensive tasks. In the meantime, workstations are shifting towards multi-core architectures and even massively multi-core may be the norm soon. Bag-of-Tasks (BoT) applications are commonly encountered in bioinformatics. They consist of a large number of independent computation-intensive tasks. This note introduces PAR, a scalable, dynamic, parallel and distributed execution engine for Bag-of-Tasks. PAR is aimed at multi-core architectures and small clusters. Accelerations obtained thanks to PAR on two different applications are shown.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  PAR is released under the GNU General Public License version three and can be freely downloaded (http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/par/par.tgz).
authors.affiliation: Zhang Initiative Research Unit, Advanced Science Institute, RIKEN, 2-1 Hirosawa, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan. berenger@riken.jp
authors.forename: Francois
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Berenger
authors.forename: Camille
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Coti
authors.forename: Kam Y J
authors.initials: KY
authors.lastname: Zhang
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software