Hi Malay: Given your applications and the clusters' focus as a learning/research tool, I might suggest you have a look at http://www.rocksclusters.org, or Callident's forthcoming BioBrew (ROCKS for bio-applications).e OSCAR is somewhat non-trivial to install. ROCKS is likely to be the simplest installation of a functional cluster you can use. If your machines can run RedHat 7.3 you should have no problem with ROCKS. Alternatively, you could simply install RedHat, SUSE, or some other distribution upon the cluster, and hand compile mpich and other tools. I typically recommend this, as the mpich options you want are invariably not the ones built in to the binary. I would recommend SGE as a relatively simple install (and it is built into ROCKS). You could use LSF if you have the budget, or perhaps Condor. Many cluster vendors have been using RedHat 8.0 and more recently RedHat 9.0. Due to ABI (not API) changes in the core libraries, this may render some pre-compiled programs non-functional between 8 and 9, and would require a re-compile at minimum. RedHat 8.0 isn't a great distribution to build a cluster on, I know of many folks reloading clusters originally based upon RH8 with RH7.3, or similar. Library and stability issues made 8.0 a significant problem for a number of sites. RH9.0 isn't old enough for lots of cluster users to have experienced it as of this time. Moreover, changes in the end-of-life support model for these distributions may have the side effect of driving cluster users to other supported systems. One intriguing distribution I have not yet played with, which gives you a functional OpenMosix (or so it claims) is clusterKnoppix. You might also look at Scyld, though it will cost you real money. OpenMosix will happily run in the above scenarios. You would have to patch NCBI BLAST to disable use of the POSIX threads to get it to migrate (there is a patch on David States' group page at University of Michigan, written by Carlos Santos, see http://stateslab.bioinformatics.med.umich.edu/software/OM_BLAST_patch/openmosixpatch.html) OpenMosix is more of a load balancer than a job scheduler, and might require some additional tweaking to work well with MPI, PVM, and a job scheduler. The philosophies between a load balancer and a job scheduler are somewhat different, as they are trying to solve different problems. Feel free to pull down my sge_mpiblast script (http://scalableinformatics.com/downloads/sge_mpiblast) to run mpiBLAST under the SGE MPICH environment. When I get a chance to get LSF up on my cluster, I will see if I can adapt it to LSF (shouldn't be hard). Good luck and feel free to post questions. Joe On Thu, 2003-06-12 at 00:42, Malay Kumar Basu wrote: [...] -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Scalable Informatics LLC email: landman@scalableinformatics.com web: http://scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 612 4615