The computational approach to biology is dealing with an enormous availability of data and an extreme complexity in the modelling and analysis of life systems. Both these issues make the scaling-up promise of High Performance Computing extremely appealing. Currently, the possibility of parallelising algorithms and analysis techniques exploiting the various HPC emerging frameworks is receiving a lot of interest. Examples include the porting of legacy applications to clusters, e.g. those for genome analysis, and the use of distributed technologies, cloud computing, on-chip supercomputing, GPGPUs, and massively parallel architectures for the treatment of high-throughput data-sets (e.g. Xeon Phi implementations). Arguably, HPC will turn out to be an unifying aspect of the future integration of Bioinformatics, Systems and Synthetic Biology.

The aim of this special session is to present the latest efforts in HP Computational Biology and to foster the integration of researchers interested in HPC and Computational Biology.


Examples of topics of interest include, but are not limited to, HPC experiences in:

- Algorithms for genomics and proteomics
- DNA assembly and mapping
- Bio-Molecular sequence analysis
- Gene identification and annotation
- SNP analysis and classification
- Differential gene expression analysis and clustering techniques
- Phylogeny reconstruction algorithms
- Biological databases for big data management
- Modelling and simulation of biological systems
- Automated verification in Computational Biology
- Virtual labs and experiments
- HPC-based approaches in Synthetic Biology
- DNA-based biological circuits simulations
- Modelling of structural protein properties
- Parallel architectures for Computational Biology
- System infrastructure for high throughput analysis