SS-Wrapper: a package of wrapper applications for similarity searches on Linux clusters

Background Large-scale sequence comparison is a powerful tool for biological inference in modern molecular biology. Comparing new sequences to those in annotated databases is a useful source of functional and structural information about these sequences. Using software such as the basic local alignment search tool (BLAST) or HMMPFAM to identify statistically significant matches between newly sequenced segments of genetic material and those in databases is an important task for most molecular biologists. Searching algorithms are intrinsically slow and data-intensive, especially in light of the rapid growth of biological sequence databases due to the emergence of high throughput DNA sequencing techniques. Thus, traditional bioinformatics tools are impractical on PCs and even on dedicated UNIX servers. To take advantage of larger databases and more reliable methods, high performance computation becomes necessary.