A specter is haunting science: the specter of data overload. All the powers of the scientific establishment have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: the National Institutes of Health(NIH), the National Science Foundation(NSF), and the Department of Energy, among others. What funding agency has not called for novel software to distill meaning from a torrent of data; for example, from the 700 megabytes(Mb)of data per second produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the 1,600 gigabytes(Gb)generated each day by NASA's Solar Observatory, the 140 terabytes(Tb)to flow every day from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or the 480 petabytes(Pb)expected daily from the Square Kilometer Array? To deal with"the fast-growing volume of digital data," the Obama administration on March 29, 2012, announced a Big Data Initiative, with $200 million in new commitments by research agencies and an additional $250 million investment by the Department of Defense to"improve the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and glean discoveries from huge volumes of digital data."
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