I am curious if any knows of any commercial or open source solution to breaking up the NCBI dbs into various sizes. Here, our present solution is NFS mounts of /ncbi to each cluster node. Today, we gave a go at submitting numerous BLAST jobs with PBS. Boy, talk about a complete performance drain (namely nfsd). I haven't seen so many switch lights non stop in a LONG time ;) I have been experimenting with mpiBLAST (using 4 test nodes). So far its worked extremely well. I like the fact that its formatdb formats equal segments for how many nodes you specify. Now this database is only useful when using mpiBLAST. I want to try and use one version of the database for all immplementations (we also use wwwblast and command line tools). And since the BLAST dbs are precompiled, we have to use fastacmd to revert to unformatted, THEN run the mpiblast formatdb. Now do this for 20 nodes ;( If we choose this method we would have to update once a week instead of the present nightly updates. Now there has been talk lately on this list regarding installing an extra harddrive in each node and use that as the database drive. After today I am completely sold on doing this seeing how drives are very, very cheap. I guess the ending question is, we would like to use one database (with equal segments for 22 nodes) for parallel, www blast and command line BLAST programs. Does such a thing exist or am I just wishing? Oh, one more catch, we also use SAM, PFam and GCG which use our existing NCBI dbs. -- Jeremy Mann jeremy@biochem.uthscsa.edu University of Texas Health Science Center Bioinformatics Core Facility http://www.bioinformatics.uthscsa.edu Phone: (210) 567-2672