Features

Kraken BLAST is a highly scalable, extremely fast, commercial, parallelized implementation of the NCBI BLAST application developed by Research and Testing Laboratory of the South Plains in Lubbock, Texas. Installing Kraken BLAST on a single master node and installed Tentacle Servers on clusters, high performance computers, or event standard workstations will allow Kraken BLAST to automatically build and configure a distributed computer system. Kraken BLAST will then utilize the distributed computation resources to perform high-throughput BLASTs in parallel, allowing Kraken BLAST to provide performance boosts many orders of magnitude greater than standard NCBI BLAST. Currently Kraken BLAST will only return XML blast output, however this output will be an exact match to the output created by NCBI BLAST while being generated many times faster.

Kraken BLAST is currently only supported on Windows, however it will soon be available to run Tentacle Servers on MacOS X, Linux, and UNIX as well as Windows. Kraken BLAST will also run on most hardware configurations including single, multicore, and multiple processor machines, clusters, and high-performance systems.

Features:

• Automatically scales up and down depending on the number of available nodes. Scaling can even take place while a job is running!
• Allows users to run BLASTs on the local machine without the use of any distribution. This provides users with a clean user interface to use with standard BLAST.
• Able to achieve linear, and at times even superlinear, speed up on large query and database sets.
• Produces the same XML output as standard NCBI BLAST.
• Is able to run on any system running Windows XP SP3 or higher whether it be a workstation, server, or HPC system.
• Contains programs for viewing and converting the XML BLAST output.