> What areas of biological research are fundamentally limited by computer power? The fields of bioinformatics and computational biology are firmly established

> What areas of biological research are fundamentally limited by computer power? The fields of bioinformatics and computational biology are firmly established and growing rapidly. This 2012 article summarizes: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002487 http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal... But your question is specifically about computational power. Any area that requires modeling or methods that must be over-simplified in order to run on today's hardware are candidates for benefit from computational power. That seems to leave a lot of room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelling_biological_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modelling_biological_systems But I will grant that development of new algorithms is also important. It's just that computational power itself assists in the discovery of new algorithms via the development of better research platforms.