AB-BLAST Editions
All “editions” of AB-BLAST are full featured and differ only in the extent of their support for threads or parallel processing during database searches. Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition are also supported for a wider range of computing platforms (shown here) than Personal Edition.
| Personal Edition (PE) | no parallelism — single-threaded |
| Standard Edition (SE) | support for up to 2 (real or virtual) processors and 16 threads* |
| Enterprise Edition (EE) | support for up to 64 processors and 64 threads* |
*The actual number of threads employed during a database search can depend on many factors, including microprocessor capabilities, whether the processor is real or virtual, the job size, the amount of memory available, and the number of threads requested. It may also depend on whether the computer is operating on battery versus line current. A search may be unable to run at all or may run very slowly if insufficient memory is available for even a single thread. In a virtual machine environment, Standard Edition may utilize at most 2 processors (2 threads), regardless of the number of processors configured for the virtual machine. Note also that the use of more threads does not always make a job complete faster, due to inefficiencies of scale. Searches that already run fairly quickly, such as a typical BLASTN search, will tend to benefit least (or possibly even run slower) when more threads are used. Greater efficiency of overall processor utilization in a computer system can often be obtained by running multiple single-threaded searches simultaneously, rather than using a higher degree of parallelism within a single search.
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