Chapter 2 Architecting Data-Intensive Software Systems Chris A. Mattmann, Daniel J. Crichton, Andrew F. Hart, Cameron Goodale, J. Steven Hughes, Sean Kelly, Luca Cinquini, Thomas H. Painter, Joseph Lazio, Duane Waliser, Nenad Medvidovic, Jinwon Kim, and Peter Lean 1 Introduction Data-intensive software is increasingly prominent in today’s world, where the collection, processing, and dissemination of ever-larger volumes of data has become a driving force behind innovation in the early twenty-first century. The trend towards massive data manipulation is broad-based, and case studies can be examined in domains from politics, to intelligence gathering, to scientific and medical research. The scientific domain in particular provides a rich array of case studies that offer ready insight into many of the modern software engineering, and software architecture challenges associated with data-intensive systems. C.A. Mattmann () • D.J. Crichton • A.F. Hart • C. Goodale • J.S. Hughes • S. Kelly • L. Cinquini • T.H. Painter • J. Lazio • D. Waliser Instrument and Science Data Systems, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA e-mail: chris.a.mattmann@nasa.gov; daniel.j.crichton@jpl.nasa.gov; andrew.f.hart@jpl.nasa.gov; cameron.e.goodale@jpl.nasa.gov; john.s.hughes@jpl.nasa.gov; sean.kelly@jpl.nasa.gov; luca.cinquini@jpl.nasa.gov; thomas.painter@jpl.nasa.gov; joseph.lazio@jpl.nasa.gov; duane.e.waliser@jpl.nasa.gov N. Medvidovic Computer Science Department, Viterbi School of Engineering University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: neno@usc.edu J. Kim Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering (JIFRESSE), University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: jkim@atmos.ucla.edu P. Lean Department of Meteorology, University of Reading Reading, UK e-mail: p.w.lean@reading.ac.uk B. Furht and A. Escalante (eds.), Handbook of Data Intensive Computing, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-1415-5 2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 25