The Installation is fairly simple. SCATTER requires that the main directory in which SCATTER is installed is NFS mounted on all the other nodes of the cluster. Moreover, rsh from the head node of the cluster to the other nodes should be enabled. Since SCATTER works off a distributed database, its use is not limited to physically hardwired clusters. It can be used over any groups of machines on a network which have rsh enabled between them. Since the databases are distributed and the only thing "pulled" over the network is the query sequence, the performance hit is not a major issue in this case.

1. Set the $SCATTER_HOME environment variable to $HOME/SCATTER on your head node.



2. Add $SCATTER_HOME/bin or $HOME/SCATTER/bin to your $PATH variable on your head node.



3. Create a link DB_DIR in the / directory to the directory in which the database is stored. You would need root privileges for this.



4. Edit ScatterServer.pl and ScatterClient.pl and replace the occurrence of tbnode1.bii-sg.org with the hostname of your head node. Also set the path where your blastall executable is located by setting the $BLAST_COMMAND variable in ScatterClient.pl.



5. Edit the clientfile and fill in the node names that you wish to use.



6. That's it!! You are all set to go! I have provided a few query files in the $SCATTER_HOME/seq directory for people to test it out.