Bioinformatics is an outlier within HPC. It's less about numerical computing and more about processing string data with weird algorithms and data structures that are rarely used anywhere else.

Distributed computing never really took off in bioinformatics, because most tasks are conveniently small. For example, a human genome is small enough that you can run most tasks involving a single genome on an average cost-effective server in a reasonable time. And that was already true 10–15 years ago. And if you have a lot of data, it usually means that you have many independent tasks.

Which is nice from the perspective of a tool developer. You don't have to deal with the bureaucracy of distributed computing, as it's the user's responsibility.

C++ is popular for developing bioinformatics tools. Some core tools are written in C, but actual C developers are rare. And Rust has become popular with new projects — to the extent that I haven't really seen C++20 or newer in the field.

Bioinformatics is also seeing huge gains from rewriting the slow Python code into highly parallel Rust (way less fiddly than C++ for the typical academic dev).