MrBayes is a program for the Bayesian estimation of phylogeny. mrbayes-multi provides a multi-processor version of MrBayes.

In order to run the parallel version of Mr Bayes (across multiple processors) you must have mpi and installed, and MrBayes must be launched using the mpirun command (i.e. it cannot be executed in the standard interactive mode). Finally you will need to have mpd configured on your system.

To achieve the above, you can run commands similar to the following:

In the first command above, you will want to change the text "secret" to a password only you know. In the final command, change the number 4 to the number of cores you wish to run mrbayes over.

Bayesian inference of phylogeny is based upon a quantity called the posterior probability distribution of trees, which is the probability of a tree conditioned on the observations. The conditioning is accomplished using Bayes's theorem. The posterior probability distribution of trees is impossible to calculate analytically; instead, MrBayes uses a simulation technique called Markov chain Monte Carlo (or MCMC) to approximate the posterior probabilities of trees.