Immediate Actions
Specific funding over the next two years could greatly stimulate the development, deployment, and application of big-data computing. In making these short-term expenditures, we must take care to make investments that lead to substantial short and long-term benefits. In particular, computer hardware is fundamentally a depreciating asset, with systems having a useful lifetime of 3-5 years. So, investing heavily in machines in anticipation of a future computing need is wasteful. We should spend only as much as can be beneficially used right away. Networking infrastructure has a longer-term useful lifetime (8-10 years), and so these investments can have longer term value. Finally, knowledgeable people are an appreciating asset. Providing funding opportunities for more students and researchers to work with big-data computing will yield very high returns over many years.