Data-intensive computing this approach is considered suitable for data-intensive computing and problems which are “embarrassingly parallel”, i.e. where it is relatively easy to separate the problem into a number of parallel tasks and there is no dependency or communication required between the tasks other than overall management of the tasks. These types of data processing problems are inherently adaptable to various forms of distributed computing including clusters, data grids, and cloud computing. Several common characteristics of data-intensive computing systems distinguish them from other forms of computing: A variety of system architectures have been implemented for data-intensive computing and large-scale data analysis applications
Data-intensive computing growing data volumes, significantly reducing associated data analysis cycles to support practical, timely applications, and developing new algorithms which can scale to search and process massive amounts of data. Researchers coined the term BORPS for "billions of records per second" to measure record processing speed in a way analogous to how the term MIPS applies to describe computers' processing speed. Computer system architectures which can support data parallel applications were promoted in the early 2000s for large-scale data processing requirements of data-intensive computing. Data-parallelism applied computation independently to each data item of a set of data, which allows the degree