This comment has been in my code for a long time. Its taken from a Feb 2005 posting by Aaron Darling.

        # http://bioinformatics.org/pipermail/bioclusters/2005-February/002283.html
        #
        #> One additional factor that can significantly impact the run time is the
        #> length of DB sequences that your queries hit.  By default, versions
        #> 1.2.x and 1.3.0 of mpiBLAST transmit the *entire* database sequence over
        #> the wire, not just the portion of the sequence used in the resulting
        #> alignment.  Nucleotide databases like nt or the human chromosome DB
        #> contain sequences several MB in length, which can result in LOTS of
        #> network traffic.  Long sequences are not usually a problem with protein
        #> sequence databases.  Fortunately, a workaround exists for blastn
        #> searches.  The command-line option --disable-mpi-db will prevent workers
        #> from transmitting sequences over the network.  Instead, the writer
        #> process reads only the necessary parts of the sequence from the database
        #> on shared storage (e.g. it reads a small amount of data from NFS instead
        #> of a large amount of data from worker nodes).
        #>
        #> Summary: to get good performance, always use --disable-mpi-db when
        #> performing blastn searches on databases with large sequence entries like
        #> nt and human chromosomes.


Based on the above advice, I've long included "--disable-mpi-db" on the commandline for my large nucleotide databases. I've observed increasingly frequent, reproducible crashes for sometime now. Usually with an mpirun stderr including a message like

[blastall] FATAL ERROR: CoreLib [001.000]  gi|56707187|ref|NC_006570.1|: Failed to allocate 154047549 bytes

Removing " --disable-mpi-db" from my command line has eliminated all crashes after several rounds of tests.

I will continue to investigate, but would welcome any relevant information from you all.
 
--
Mike Cariaso * Bioinformatics Software * http://cariaso.com

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