**2.1. NCBI hardware and software**

The hardware available at NCBI includes a Univa Grid Engine (UGE) Grid-Engine-based computer farm and PanFS scalable storage system connected through a powerful router. The most recent version UGE 8.2.1 includes support for Linux GROUPs, support for Window server execution nodes, and a beta version of DRMMA2 (Distributed Resource Management and Application API 2). A large weakly coupled distributed computer system like this requires coarse-grained parallelization approaches with minimal communication between the proc‐ esses. Many processing steps, such as computing BLAST hits, are naturally parallel.
