Applications and challenges of high performance computing in genomics

With the rapid development of high-throughput sequencing technologies, the scale of sequencing data continuously increases at unprecedented speed. In the field of genomics, high performance computing (HPC) is urgently needed to process these large-scale sequencing data, which uses supercomputers and parallel processing technologies to solve complex computing problems and performs intensive computing operations across massive resources. Nowadays, high performance computing plays an important role in data-driven sciences, and is widely used in genomics research. However, while dealing with massive multi-dimensional genomics data using high performance computing, there are still many challenges which limit the wide applications of HPC, such as high data complexity, huge memory requirements and low parallel computing performance. In this paper, we reviewed the irreplaceable applications of high performance computing in genomics, especially in pan-genome, single-cell transcriptome and large-scale population sequencing studies. In future, with the developing methods of hardware acceleration and algorithm optimization, the applications of high performance computing will be more inseparable in complex and large-scale genomics studies.