Thanks for the laugh karlgoethebier :) From time to time, I search for MCE and threads on PerlMonks. This looked interesting and thought a great use case for Kyoto Cabinet. See also, Tokyo Dystopia.

It is mind boggling to me, seeing many processes running near 100% CPU utilization no matter if involving IO. The OP stated running on a machine having 500 GiB of memory. The beauty of it all is that the 100 GiB NR.fasta file is read into file system cache by the operating system (this is true on Linux - the entire file if available memory). Subsequent scans are then read from cache. Workers do not make an extra copy due to reading from a memory-mapped I/O handle. Meaning that one can run with many workers. The limiting factor is the memory subsystem - how fast.

Well, I enjoyed writing the demonstrations including one with chunking.

Lots of love, Mario