Latest advances in distributed, parallel, and graphic processing unit accelerated approaches to computational biology

this special issue of Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience is partially a follow-up to some special sessions/workshops held in the context of international conferences in the field of HPC, such as the special session 'Grid, Parallel and Distributed Bioinformatics Applications' of the 'Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP)' [19]. European Grid Infrastructure [20] has organized each year two forums as successors of the Enabling Grids for e-Science in Europe conferences [21] for the HPC community with dedicated sessions to the life sciences since 2009. Also, smaller events are launched very successfully in this field like the workshop series International Workshop on Science Gateways for Life Sciences (IWSG) [22] extended to IWSG for a wider community or the Black Forest Grid Workshop[23].