Big Data and High Performance Computing

Big Data has been much in the news in recent years, and the advantages conferred by the collection and analysis of large datasets in fields such as marketing, medicine and finance have led to claims that almost any real world problem could be solved if sufficient data were available. This is of course a very simplistic view, and the usefulness of collecting, processing and storing large datasets must always be seen in terms of the communication, processing and storage capabilities of the computing platforms available. This book presents papers from the International Research Workshop, Advanced High Performance Computing Systems, held in Cetraro, Italy, in July 2014. The papers selected for publication here discuss fundamental aspects of the definition of Big Data, as well as considerations from practice where complex datasets are collected, processed and stored. The concepts, problems, methodologies and solutions presented are of much more general applicability than may be suggested by the particular application areas considered. As a result the book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the processing of very large data sets, exascale computing and the emerging fields of data science.