Greetings biocluster readers, Forgive me if this is not the sort of message you normally get, but I wanted to make you aware of a new cluster solution that we at Texas A&M have just implemented for bioinformatics users. We have a five node (10 cpu) Xserve cluster, one node serves as the head node only, and four are workers. Users access the system over the web and submit jobs via PISE (Letondal C. A Web interface generator for molecular biology programs in Unix. Bioinformatics. 2001 Jan;17(1):73-82. PMID: 11222264 ). Pise then sends the job to a Sun Grid Engine queue, where it is split and sent to the workers. This is the first implementation/port of SGE for MacOS X that I am aware of. Upon completion, e-mail is sent to the user with either a mime attachment of results or a URL to browse results. Multiple users are thus allowed concurrent access to resources using SGE. Command line use is also supported. Applications at this stage include all of the biotools ported to Mac OS X by the BioTeam ( http://bioteam.net), such as Altivec optimized BLAST, HMMER, FASTA and Clustal and the EMBOSS suite. Porting, configuration and installation of the cluster software was done by The BioTeam (http://bioteam.net) for us. As far as I know, this is the first cluster implementation of it's kind, using PISE, SGE queue management and OS X. As an example, of performance, I ran a set of 3600 ESTs against Swissprot (BLASTX) using all 8 cpus and the job ran in about 45 minutes. The same ESTs against build 30 of the human genome (Database: /BlastDB/H_sapiens 1388 sequences; 2,825,300,773 total letters) took 2 hours and 10 minutes on all 8 cpus. I have not run rigorous comparative tests yet between this cluster and our other BLAST server (SGI Origin 3800 multiprocessor/shared memory machine), but my gut feeling is that the Xserve cluster is running significantly faster. You can browse our site at: http://xblast.tamu.edu I have to commend The BioTeam (in particular Bill VanEtten) for their work. Cheers, Dave -- David L. Adelson, Ph.D. Associate Professor - Animal Genomics Dept. of Animal Science Dept. of Veterinary Anatomy and Public Health Faculty of Genetics Postal address: Animal Science Dept. Texas A&M University TAMU - 2471 College Station,TX 77843-2471 U.S.A. Tel. +1 979 845 2616 Fax. +1 979 845 6970 http://animalscience.tamu.edu/ansc/breeding.html