Editing Portal:HPC - High Performance Computing (section)

=== Bioinformatics, scientific pipelines, and Perl HPC ===

Bioinformatics is one of the clearest historical examples of Perl in scientific and HPC-adjacent work. Perl was heavily used for sequence processing, BLAST parsing, genome annotation, pipeline automation, and database loading. Much of this work was not “HPC kernel programming” in the narrow sense, but it often ran on clusters and processed large datasets.

A 2024 paper on Perl in bioinformatics argues that Perl still offers useful abstractions for building applications from existing components, including object-oriented frameworks, PDL, Alien, FFI, Inline, and OpenMP.<ref>Christos Argyropoulos, “Enhancing non-Perl bioinformatic applications with Perl,” arXiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.10271, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref>

This is a good example of Perl’s continued scientific value. Even when the fashionable language for a field changes, older Perl systems, CPAN modules, and scripts often remain embedded in production research workflows.