Looking for a gift for your favorite Big Data fan? Ian Gorton and Deborah Gracio of PNNL are co-editors of a new book, Data-Intensive Computing, Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications. The book addresses the big-data challenge of how to transform terabytes and petabytes of streaming data into information that enables vital discoveries and timely decisions for energy, environment and national security.
The world is awash with digital data from social networks, blogs, business, science, and engineering. Data-intensive computing facilitates understanding of complex problems that must process massive amounts of data. Through the development of new classes of software, algorithms, and hardware, data-intensive applications can provide timely and meaningful analytical results in response to exponentially growing data complexity and associated analysis requirements. This emerging area brings many challenges that are different from traditional high-performance computing. This reference for computing professionals and researchers describes the dimensions of the field, the key challenges, the state of the art, and the characteristics of likely approaches that future data-intensive problems will require.