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. Chapters cover general principles and methods for designing such systems and for managing and analyzing the big data sets of today that live in the cloud and describe example applications in bioinformatics and cybersecurity that illustrate these principles in practice.

"Overall, I recommend this book for researchers and advanced graduate students. The collection presents different essays for a very rich and diversified overview of one of the most recent and fast-paced revolutions in computer science." Radu State, Computing Reviews

Ian Gorton is a Laboratory Fellow in Computational Sciences and Math at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where he manages the Data Intensive Scientific Computing Group and was the Chief Architect for PNNL's Data Intensive Computing Initiative. Gorton is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computer Society and a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society. Debbie Gracio joined Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 1990 and is currently the Director for the Computational and Statistical Analytics Division and for the Data Intensive Computing Research Initiative. Since joining the laboratory, she has led the research, development, and management of multiple cross-disciplinary, multi-laboratory projects focused in the basic sciences and national security sectors.