We presented using Parquet formats for bioinformatics 2012/13-ish at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) and got laughed out of the place.

While using Apache Spark for bioinformatics [0] never really took off, I still think Parquet formats for bioinformatics [1] is a good idea, especially with DuckDB, Apache Arrow, etc. supporting Parquet out of the box.

0 - https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam

1 - https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/bdg-formats