Experiment 2 was executed on a total of 66 nodes allocated on the Microsoft Azure Platform, being all nodes from the same location (East-North US). Two A4 instances (8 cores and 14 GB memory) were configured as master nodes, and 64 A3 (4 cores and 7 GB memory) instances were configured as computing nodes. Both SparkBLAST and CloudBLAST executed queries on two datasets (Buz.fasta, and Ber.fasta), varying the number of cores allocated as 1 (BLAST sequential execution), 4, 12, 28, 60, 124 and 252. Every execution was repeated 6 times for CloudBLAST and six times for SparkBLAST. Thus, Experiment 2 encompasses 2×2×7×6=168 executions in total, which demanded more than 8,118 h (wall clock) to execute. An estimate on the amount of computational resources, this experiment consumed more than 139,595 vCPU-hours to execute on the Azure Cloud.