The invention pertains to a system and method for dispatching and executing the compute-intensive parts of the workflow for database queries on an attached high-performance, parallel computing platform. The performance overhead for moving the required data and results between the database platform and the high-performance computing platform where the workload is executed is amortized in several ways, for example, by exploiting the fine-grained parallelism and superior hardware performance on the parallel computing platform for speeding up compute-intensive calculations, by using in-memory data structures on the parallel computing platform to cache data sets between a sequence of time-lagged queries on the same data, so that these queries can be processed without further data transfer overheads, by replicating data within the parallel computing platform so that multiple independent queries on the same target data set can be simultaneously processed using independent parallel partitions of the high-performance computing platform. A specific embodiment of this invention was used for deploying a bio-informatics application involving gene and protein sequence matching using the Smith-Waterman algorithm on a database system connected via an Ethernet local area network to a parallel supercomputer.