For simulation problems where each iteration of an algorithm depends on calculated world state from the previous iterations, then interconnect speed is all. You

For simulation problems where each iteration of an algorithm depends on calculated world state from the previous iterations, then interconnect speed is all. You can't start the next iteration until all jobs in the current iteration are complete. This is what you need a supercomputer for! Most bioinformatics workloads are simply nothing like that. There are very large amounts of data to process, but it is not a supercomputing problem because the jobs are independent and can be completed in any order. > ‘We had 20,000 translocations from human cancers from the COSMIC database; 200 bases of DNA for each translocation; and about 200-400 iterations at each position,’ Bacolla said. The number of iterations totaled about two billion. Here we don't even have a big-data problem (200 * 20K = 4M), just a huge number of combinations to test.