Dynamic programming is an important algorithm design technique in computational biology and scientific computing. Typical applications using this technique are very compute-intensive and suffer from long runtimes on sequential architectures. Parallel program design patterns provide a new tool to semi-automatically generate parallel programs. In this paper we present a new parallel pattern called the "block-cyclic based wavefront" to parallelize typical dynamic programming algorithms in computational biology and scientific computing. We show how this technique leads to significant run-time savings on PC clusters.