The life sciences have traditionally not been heavy users of computational resources, as most research in this field was qualitative rather than quantitative. Technological advances and the "industrialization" of a significant segment of biological and medical research have put HPC at the core of cutting edge biomedical science. The emerging fields of genomics and systems biology, and the increasing reliance on statistical analysis and modelling in the interpretation of high-throughput biomedical data, have pushed the development of specific software and of the IT infrastructure to support it. The Vital-IT center of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics will be presented as a example of a specific HPC installation serving the needs of biomedical science.