> ->Interface card: Yeah, Myrinet would be great. > Back to Earth: we are thinking either 100Base-T or > Gigabit Ethernet (most probably the first one. It depends which kind of BLAST you want to run -- -> 1 large parallel, or -> many small serial In practice, small serial jobs provide a better throughput than just the large 1. This is mainly due to the communication time needed between processes for the large, parallel job. A fast network card will help in both cases, since data will travel faster from the file server to the execution nodes. However, if you go with the "many small serial jobs" model, then your network is mainly for sending data to/from the execution nodes, but not for job execution. -Ron __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Health - your guide to health and wellness http://health.yahoo.com