Have a lot of BLAST searches to run? Run it with ElasticBLAST!

Do you need to run high volume BLAST searches? Do you have proprietary sequence data to search and cannot use the NCBI BLAST web site? Do you want to avoid the work to set-up and maintain stand-alone BLAST? If you answered yes to any of these questions, read on!

NCBI provides ElasticBLAST that can run your searches on the cloud. BLAST workloads often come in bursts. You may want to search a large number of sequences all at once and need the results as soon as possible to enable further analysis. Often the number of sequences and rapid turnaround needed preclude using a web service. In many situations like this you also don’t have a continuous need that would justify an investment in your own dedicated server. Using ElasticBLAST to run your searches on the cloud is an ideal solution. Popular BLAST databases are also available in the cloud allowing you to run computations close to the data, eliminating the time and resources needed to download large data files to your local network. In the cloud, you are not restricted by local compute resources or limits on public web services and don’t have compute power that sits idle most of the time.

What are the next steps?

Getting started is easy! Being familiar with cloud services is helpful, but not necessary. ElasticBLAST is supported on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It supports most BLAST programs and options and can easily run searches on discounted instances, meaning you can run your searches for less. We have instructions for using ElasticBLAST, which will guide you to the QuickStart for your cloud provider and let you try it out with minimal effort.

Resources

We are always listening and welcome your feedback at BLAST Support Center.