Cloud-Coffee: implementation of a parallel consistency-based multiple alignment algorithm in the T-Coffee package and its benchmarking on the Amazon Elastic-Cloud

Abstract
Summary: We present the first parallel implementation of the T-Coffee consistency-based multiple aligner. We benchmark it on the Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) and show that the parallelization procedure is reasonably effective. We also conclude that for a web server with moderate usage (10K hits/month) the cloud provides a cost-effective alternative to in-house deployment. Availability: T-Coffee is a freeware open source package available from http://www.tcoffee.org/homepage.html Contact:cedric.notredame@crg.es