System requirements

Supported computer systems

Both single and multiple (SMP) CPU systems are supported. The software is multithreaded (using pthreads), allowing efficient use on SMP servers with multiple microprocessors. Clusters and other systems that communicate using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard are also supported.

Supported microprocessors and operating systems

SENCEL PARALIGN™ has been designed to work with the following combinations of operating systems and microprocessors:

Operating system	Microprocessors
Linux kernel 2.4 (i386) or later	Intel Pentium MMX, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4, Celeron, Xeon or Xeon MP. AMD K6, K6-2, K6-III, Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, Athlon 4.
Linux kernel 2.4 (x86_64) or later	AMD Athlon 64, Opteron. *
Linux kernel 2.4 (IA64) or later	Intel Itanium 2
Linux kernel 2.4 (PPC64) or later	IBM PowerPC 970
HP-UX 11i version 2 or later	Intel Itanium 2
Mac OS X version 10.2 or later	Motorola PowerPC G4 IBM PowerPC G5 (970)
HP Tru64 Unix version 5.1 or later	HP Alpha 21264 EV6 or later

* Only 32-bit executables of PARALIGN are currently available for the AMD 64-bit processors.

Disk and memory requirements

The software itself does not need more than a few megabytes of storage. However, you will need disk space for the databases, which can be rather large. The programs work best if you have enough memory (RAM) in the computer to hold all the sequence information from the database in memory. Note that the nucleotide databases are stored on disk and in RAM in a compressed form, requiring only about one byte for every four nucleotides.