IN A BROAD range of application areas, data is being collected at an unprecedented scale. Decisions that previously were based on guesswork, or on painstakingly handcrafted models of reality, can now be made using data-driven mathematical models. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey 23 has transformed astronomy from a field where taking pictures of the sky was a large part of an astronomer's job to one where the pictures are already in a database, and the astronomer's task is to find interesting objects and phenomena using the database. In the biological sciences, there is now a well-established tradition of depositing scientific data into a public repository, and also of creating public databases for use by other scientists. Furthermore, as technology advances, particularly with the advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), the size and number of experimental datasets available is increasing exponentially. 13 The growth rate of the output of current NGS methods in terms of the raw sequence data produced by a single NGS machine is shown in Figure 1, along with the performance increase for the SPECint CPU benchmark. Clearly, the NGS sequence data growth far outstrips the performance gains offered by Moore's Law for single-threaded applications (here, SPECint). Note the sequence data size in Figure 1 is the output of analyzing the raw images that are actually produced by the NGS instruments. The size of these raw image datasets themselves is so large (many TBs per lab per day) that it is impractical today to even consider storing them. Rather, these images are analyzed on the fly to produce sequence data, which is then retained. Big Data has the potential to revolutionize much more than just research. Google's work on Google File System and MapReduce, and subsequent open source work on systems like Hadoop, have led to arguably the most extensive development and adoption of Big Data technologies, led by companies focused on the Web, such as Facebook, Big Data is revolutionizing all aspects of our lives ranging from enterprises to consumers, from science to government. Many case studies show there are huge rewards waiting for those who use Big Data correctly.