The Smith-Waterman algorithm they made an accelerator for was probably chosen because it is highly parallelizable. On a CPU it is more accurate but a lot slower than the BLAST algorithm, which is more commonly used to search for similar DNA or Protein sequences. One could think that this chip would make the more accurate Smith-Waterman algorithm more attractive to use, but I suspect the difference is not large enough to get biologists invest in specialized hardware. I think this is more of a showcase of what you can do with accelerators, and they picked a problem that would give impressive numbers.