Comment by dekhn

Every time somebody has attempted to do this (for exmaple BLAST using custom ASICs or FPGAs), the next Intel chip- its general purpose capabilities, not any special stuff- has gotten fast enough and cheap enough to make custom hardware irrelevant. I don't see that changing any time soon- we're not actually blocked on any heavily CPU-bound problems in the genomics area right now, except perhaps machine learning on variants, and that's handled by GPUs, which are commodity hardware.