This document discusses high performance computing (HPC) and its applications in bioinformatics. It covers the basics of HPC, including definitions of common HPC architectures like clusters, grids, and clouds. It then discusses how HPC can be applied to bioinformatics tasks like BLAST sequence alignment. Examples are given of parallel versions of BLAST like mpiBLAST that can run on clusters, grids, and clouds. The document concludes by listing several open source bioinformatics software projects available for researchers.