The average execution times are presented in Fig. 3. SparkBLAST achieved a maximum speedup (which is the ratio between execution time of the one node baseline over the run time for the parallel execution) of 41.78, reducing the execution time from 28,983 s in a single node, to 693 s in 64 nodes. In the same scenario, CloudBLAST achieved speedup of 37, reducing the execution time from 30,547 to 825 s on 64 nodes. For this set of executions, both SparkBLAST and CloudBLAST used 2 vCPUs per node for tasks execution. The speedup is presented in Fig. 4. As shown, SparkBLAST presents better scalability than CloudBLAST. Fig. 3Total execution time for CloudBLAST vs. SparkBLAST running on the Google Cloud. Values represent the average of six executions for each experiment Fig. 4Speedup for 1 to 64 nodes in the Google Cloud. SparkBlast was executed on virtual machines with one and two cores. CloudBlast was executed on nodes with two cores