Sometimes users run scripts without checking the parameters first, often recycling scripts they’ve used elsewhere, at former jobs or at other institutes. Sometimes this works out, sometimes it doesn’t…

With a load of ~75 and 32 physical cores, the CPU usage on this server is oversubscribed 2.3 times a “normal” 100% load (where 100% of 32 CPUs would be a load of 32.0). Luckily nobody else is using it right now!

The job in question is the highly-parallelizable blastx; a sequence search/alignment tool used by Bioinformaticians to determine if a given protein sequence matches proteins for a known nucleotide coding region.