I have read a very interesting paper by Geoffrey J. Barton, CABIOS
vol 7,1:85-88(1991):
"Scanning protein sequence databanks using a distributed processing
workstation network".
Instead of buing an expencive Connection Machine (or a similar machine)
for doing exhaustive sequence comparison, it may be satisfactory to run
the problem on a set of powerful workstations. (Many institutions have
large quantities of workstations and fileservers that are very lightly
loaded in the nights. Theese machines can be used for exhaustive
sequence comparison, "in parallel").
The programme for doing this is named 'pscan', and written by Geoffrey
J. Barton. It runs on Unix systems that support NFS.
In the paper this programme is said to be available to academic users:
"The source code of and details of the implementation of pscan are
available to academic users on a variety of media, or via electronic
mail".
I would be gratefully to know more about the experience whith pscan,
and to get the e-mail and/or ftp-address where I can get it. The
e-mail address for Geoffrey J. Barton, Oxford?, would also be great.
Geir Egil Hauge
(geirha at ifi.uio.no)
