> Genetic stuff always seemed not easily parallelizable

Not really. Processing one sample may take a few hours but if you have hundreds or more samples, it's an obvious axis for independent parallelization.

The cool kids use Nextflow or CWL these days. It's something like `make` - it remembers what you've already computed and what the dependencies are - but it uses a batch engine like SGE/Condor/AWS Batch to actually execute the jobs.