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 including parallel and distributed relational database management systems which have been available to run on shared nothing clusters of processing nodes for more than two decades. However most data growth is with data in unstructured form and new processing paradigms with more flexible data models were needed. Several solutions have emerged including the MapReduce architecture pioneered by Google and now available in an open-source implementation called Hadoop used by Yahoo, Facebook, and others. LexisNexis Risk Solutions also developed and implemented a scalable platform for data-intensive computing which is used by LexisNexis. The MapReduce architecture and programming model pioneered by Google