The Register: Los Alamos Lends Open Source Hand to Life Sciences

“Researchers at Los Alamos National Labs have struck computing
gold once again with an open source project that could benefit
genetic research.

“Three scientists have tried their hand at improving the popular
BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) search algorithms. The
group decided to chop up a BLAST database and spread it across a
number of servers instead of throwing lots of horsepower at a
single data set. In so doing, the need to run I/O requests to disk
was eliminated and the researchers saw huge, super-linear
performance gains.

“The experiment to put little bits of a database in memory
instead of on disk proved a success and has since drawn
considerable attention to mpiBLAST from pharmaceutical companies,
researchers and even Microsoft…”

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