We have a problem with 66 nodes becoming NFS bound when blasting many (>10,000) sequences against the same database set. One approach (which we are trying) is to cache database files locally, so nodes can re-read their files without bottlenecking on NFS. A totally different approach, with even better performance potential, would be if a blast process could start up, load its database(s) and process multiple queries until told to exit. This dilutes the startup cost across all the jobs to be run on that node. Does NCBI blast do this? Is there a blast that does? Anyone interested in writing one? What's involved? Thanks for any pointers, michaelj -- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166