Welcome to the Kraken BLAST Website

Kraken BLAST is a highly scalable, extremely fast, commercial, parallelized implementation of the NCBI BLAST application developed by Research and Testing Laboratory of the South Plains in Lubbock, Texas. Installing Kraken BLAST on a single master node and installed Tentacle Servers on clusters, high performance computers, or even standard workstations will allow Kraken BLAST to automatically build and configure a distributed computer system. Kraken BLAST will then utilize the distributed computation resources to perform high-throughput BLASTs in parallel, allowing Kraken BLAST to provide performance boosts many orders of magnitude greater than standard NCBI BLAST. Currently Kraken BLAST will only return XML blast output, however this output will be an exact match to the output created by NCBI BLAST while being generated many times faster.

Kraken BLAST is currently only supported on Windows, however it will soon be available to run Tentacle Servers on MacOS X, Linux, and UNIX as well as Windows. Kraken BLAST will also run on most hardware configurations including single, multicore, and multiple processor machines, clusters, and high-performance systems.

Latest Kraken BLAST News

February 4, 2011:

Kraken BLAST Beta Version 0.7.4 released. This update includes bug fixes to correct issues regarding how Kraken generates sequence segments, creates DLL directories, and resolved a bug that allowed Kraken to hang indefinitely if a Tentacle failed to reconnect after completing a data segment. Updated the way Kraken shuts down to ensure it does not confirm closing when closed via the Task Manager or when ordered to close when the machine is shutting down / rebooting. Kraken BLAST version 0.7.3 requires the use of Tentacle version 0.6.4 or higher, but prefers Tentacle version 0.7.0.

January 11, 2011:

Kraken BLAST Beta Version 0.7.3 released. This update includes bug fixes to correct issues regarding how Kraken determines the amount of time it takes to write each blastout segment and resolved an issue that allowed Kraken to hang when the force database upload option was checked. New features include the ability for Kraken to estimate the amount of time remaining for a BLAST and various code re-writes to increase the speed and stability of the program. Kraken BLAST version 0.7.3 requires the use of Tentacle version 0.6.4 or higher, but prefers Tentacle version 0.7.0.

December 3, 2010:

Kraken BLAST Beta Version 0.7.2 released. This update includes bug fixes to correct issues regarding how Kraken sends out databases, correct issues regarding how Tentacle handles fragmented databases, correct and issue regarding the possibly for Kraken to crash when it is exiting, and correct an issue where the Active Tentacle list would sometimes show the IP address instead of the host name for Tentacles when they failed. Kraken BLAST version 0.7.2 requires the use of Tentacle version 0.6.4 or higher, but prefers Tentacle version 0.7.0.

October 27, 2010:

Kraken BLAST Beta Version 0.7.1 released. Update fixes a bug that allowed the Active Tentacls list to contain multiple copies of a Tentacle when a Tentacle rebooted and also corrects an issue that caused the program to crash if a new Tentacle joined the network when the program was working on another Tentacle. This version also adds new status box messages to let the usr know when the program is estimating file sizes. Kraken BLAST version 0.7.1 requires the use of Tentacle version 0.6.4 or higher, but prefers Tentacle version 0.7.0.

October 12, 2010:

Kraken BLAST Beta Version 0.7.0 released. This update is classified as a major revision of the Kraken BLAST program and contains the following changes:
- Bug Fixes:
  - TBLASTX was incorrectly asking for protein databases. This has been corrected so that it will only accept nucleotide databases.
  - Fixed a bug that made Kraken unable to BLAST fasta files that contained 100 or less sequences.
  - Fixed an unhandled exception bug related to finding new Tentacles on the network.
  - Corrected a problem that causes Kraken to crash when it attempted to use a sequence file that contained more than 2,147,483,647 sequences. Kraken will now accept a maximum of $9,223,372,036,854,775,807 sequences in a single input sequence file.$
  - $Patched a bug in Kraken that caused the program to not let go of a database file correctly if an upload failed.$
  - $Patched a bug in Tentacle that caused the program to not let go of a database file correctly if a download failed.$
- Query Databases have been completed revised:
  - Databases can now be removed from Kraken and the connected Tentacles through the Kraken interface.
  - New databases now generate an Information File that contains information vital to Kraken.
  - The Tentacles will now use the previously mentioned Information Files to determine if it needs a new copy of the database - This method is far more reliable than the previous method used in version 0.1.0 - 0.6.5.
  - The database list now only shows databases that were added using the built in database formatter.
  - Kraken will automatically update old databases (added to Kraken before version 0.7.0) to the new database standard.
- Revisions made to the Tentacle remote node client:
  - A second communication port was established to allow Tentacle to recieve stop commands.
  - Tentacle now uses the .nnfo and .pnfo (Information) files to check if a database needs to update.
  - The Tentacle log file now prints to a new file each month. This is in keeping with how Kraken does logging.
- Kraken now issues shutdown commands to each Tentacle when Kraken ends. This kills the work each Tentacle is doing so that they will not continue to use up resources when the Kraken client is closed.
- Kraken BLAST version 0.7.0 will use Tentacle version 0.6.4, however Tentacle 0.7.0 requires the use of Kraken BLAST version 0.7.0 or higher.

Contact Information

Have any questions about Kraken BLAST, wish to evaluate Kraken BLAST for a 30-day free trial, or wish to purchase Kraken BLAST? Contact us by electronic mail at eric@researchandtesting.com.

     Postal address
          4321 Marsha Sharp FWY, Lubbock, TX 79407
     Electronic mail
          General Information: eric@researchandtesting.com
          Sales: eric@researchandtesting.com
          Customer Support: eric@researchandtesting.com