ZAlign is a local sequence aligner, especially intended for use with large biological DNA sequences, with more than 1Mbp (Millions of base pairs). It uses the Smith-Waterman exact algorithm with affine gap cost function to perform this task.

zAlign can be used both in distributed (clusters, for example) or standalone environments. Currently it has been tested on Linux and Sun Solaris, using both the MPICH (http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/projects/mpi/mpich1/) and OpenMPI (http://www.open-mpi.org/) implementations. Ports for other Unix-like environments are highly considered.