It’s not a waste. It’s a test of top-end computing equipment and techniques. If you’re going to spend millions on a system for big-money or life-impacting computations, you want to know it can at least handle something as relatively trivial as computing trillions of digits of pi.
Wouldn’t you have to verify the answer is correct in that case? What they do, run it twice and hand check it?
Cheap enough on trivial computations that exceed the prior record of 50 trillion digits on a PC in Jan. 2020.
As to RNA analysis-— its a nice sales pitch, for something highly speculative and small demand. Speaking from a biochemical pharma clinical perspective.
Interesting they chose this as an example. As opposed to fluid dynamics or military applications, very life impacting.