[sampo]

But your Big Data system is only good for Big Data. If I want to run a weather prediction model, it is not going to help.

My point is, the big data and the physics simulation people probably do not have a lot of common interests - besides using large amounts of computing power.

[acadien]

There are big data people running on supercomputers too. I know there are people writing custom asynch job managers to handle big data type problems because the top supercomputers have low memory latency.

Also I think the dichotomy you're looking for is IO bound vs CPU bound problems. Although certainly there are a plethora of different kinds of IO bound problems (asynch vs synch or disk bound vs memory bound vs cache bound).