One of the major applications of future generation parallel and distributed systems is in big-data analytics.
Data repositories for such applications currently exceed exabytes and are rapidly increasing in size.
Beyond their sheer magnitude, these datasets and associated applications’ considerations pose significant
challenges for method and software development. Datasets are often distributed and their size and privacy
considerations warrant distributed techniques. Data often resides on platforms with widely varying
computational and network capabilities. Considerations of fault-tolerance, security, and access control are
critical in many applications (Dean and Ghemawat, 2004; Apache hadoop). Analysis tasks often have hard
deadlines, and data quality is a major concern in yet other applications. For most emerging applications,
data-driven models and methods, capable of operating at scale, are as-yet unknown. Even when known
methods can be scaled, validation of results is a major issue. Characteristics of hardware platforms and the
software stack fundamentally impact data analytics. In this article, we provide an overview of the stateof-
the-art and focus on emerging trends to highlight the hardware, software, and application landscape
of big-data analytics.