nodalpoint.org

Interesting debate over at The Scientist, on the relative merits of BLAST from Paracel versus the NCBI.

I've long been interested in Paracel, except (1) I don't like paying for software, (2) I work in circumstances where I can't pay for software. Interestingly, Tom Madden from NCBI says:

"NCBI currently runs 150,000 searches a day, at peaks of 180 searches a minute, on a distributed system of CPUs," Madden writes in an E-mail. The NCBI hopes to make this version of BLAST publicly available in about six months, Madden says.

Some other notes on 64-bit, AMD Opteron, cluster architecture and so on.