CUSHAW2 is a fast and parallel gapped read alignment to large genomes, such as the human genome. The performance evaluation, by aligning simulated and real datasets to the human genome, shows that CUSHAW2 is consistently among the highest-ranked aligners in terms of alignment quality for both single-end and paired-end alignment, while demonstrating highly competitive speed. Furthermore, our aligner shows good parallel scalability with respect to the number of CPU threads.