A blog post by  Nathan T. Weeks:

Genomic sequencing is being leveraged for a wide range of applications such as helping plant breeders select for traits for higher-yielding, more nutritious, and disease-resistant crops; diagnosing and treating diseases; and tracing the ancestry of organisms in the tree of life. With the cost of this technology dropping precipitously since the advent of High-Throughput Sequencing (HTS), sequence data are being generated at an accelerating pace, challenging the ability to store, process, and analyze it.

Read the post (PDF): OpenMP Task Parallelism for Faster Genomic Data Processing