Burrows-Wheeler Aligner (BWA) is an efficient program that aligns relatively short nucleotide sequences against a long reference sequence such as the human genome. It implements two algorithms, bwa-short and BWA-SW. The former works for query sequences shorter than 200bp and the latter for longer sequences up to around 100kbp. Both algorithms do gapped alignment. They are usually more accurate and faster on queries with low error rates.
Full documentation can be found at the BWA homepage.
Li H. and Durbin R. (2009) Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows-Wheeler Transform. Bioinformatics, 25:1754-60. [PMID: 19451168]
Li H. and Durbin R. (2010) Fast and accurate long-read alignment with Burrows-Wheeler Transform. Bioinformatics, Epub. [PMID: 20080505]