The role of High Performance Computing in Bioinformatics

We are witnessing one of the major revolutions in parallel systems. The consolidation of heterogeneous systems at different levels -from desktop computers to large-scale systems such as supercomputers, clusters or grids, through all kinds of low-power devices- is providing a computational power unimaginable just few years ago, trying to follow the wake of Moore's law. This landscape in the high performance computing arena opens up great opportunities in the simulation of relevant biological systems and for applications in Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Computational Chemistry. This introductory article shows the last tendencies of this active research field and our perspectives for the forthcoming years.