Taking into account the increase in use of the multi-core cluster architecture, in this paper we analyze the use of the various communication models (message passing, shared memory, their combination) to efficiently exploit the power of the architecture. Smith-Waterman algorithm, whose parallelization is based on a pipeline scheme due to problem data dependence, is used as test case to determine the similarity degree of two DNA sequences. Finally, future research lines are mentioned, aimed at optimizing the use of memory levels in the architecture.