Biology continues to pose increasingly challenging problems for the computational scientist. In the early years of bioinformatics, challenges were focused on improving techniques for high-throughput searching of increasing volumes of sequence information. The computational biology challenges were aimed and providing structural information to further resolve and develop the insight offered through sequence searching. Of late, the computational capabilities have advanced to a point where efforts to overcome challenges in simulations of cellular systems and subsystems are prevalent.

The presentation will provide an overview of several parallel computing technologies and their applications in several areas bioinformatics and computational biology. Examples will include a blend of challenges, technologies and real-world applications involving multi-threading, message passing and increasingly reconfigurable accelerators. Current and future efforts in improving standardization across reconfigurable computing environments will also be discussed.