Re: Blast – The Amazon version

cariaso — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:25:35 -0000

It most certainly is. And if you want to see part 3 of the series it will be delivered at PyCon 2008 Chicago by

Peter Skomoroch
http://us.pycon.org/2008/pr...

for his talk
http://us.pycon.org/2008/co...

131. MPI Cluster Programming with Python and Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 may offer the possibility of high performance computing to programmers on a budget. Instead of building and maintaining a permanent Beowulf cluster, we can launch a cluster on-demand using Python and EC2. This talk will cover the basics involved in getting your own cluster running using Python, demonstrate how to run some large parallel computations using Python MPI wrappers, and show some initial results on cluster performance.

RunBlast is going to be available as a download soon, and will allow you to run Blast and other apps on a virtual EC2 cluster. Oh, by the way, RunBlast uses the Amazon payment system. Wait, isn’t Blast free? Why should I pay for it? Well if you run Blast once a year, perhaps you shouldn’t be using RunBlast, but if you’re a regular user, and do some serious crunchching, this beats buying a cluster anyday.

People who mainly use the NCBI service will do well to continue doing so. This is really targeted at groups who have a small cluster inhouse which is mainly used to run blast.

When your needs have outgrown the NCBI webserver, RunBlast allows you to have that cluster without the big upfront purchase, or the hassles of maintaining latest versions of major tools and databases.

I actually use it to run bioperl, emboss, and MrBayes. NAMD has been on my todo list but hearing its of interest should bump it up. I'll drop a line when its available.

bbgm - the discussion - Latest Comments in Blast – The Amazon version

Re: Blast – The Amazon version