In 1905, Albert Einstein derived that light was composed of
particles by fitting his theory to just a handful of data
points. This discovery changed our understanding of basic
physics and helped usher in a new era of quantum mechanics.
Today, scientists often need to interpret much larger data sets
to drive discoveries. A little more than a decade ago, the first
sequencing of a human genome cost $100 million. Now, the same
results cost no more than a used car. At about 0.8 to 1
terabyte, the full genome creates more than 4 million times the
amount of data that Einstein was investigating. Some scientists
and researchers are using tools that were developed by online
commerce and search engines to tackle these new questions. In
2003 and 2004, Google published two papers that explained how
the company repeatedly digests almost the entire internet to
collect data for our searches every couple days and, eventually,
hours. (Google recently moved away from this system of indexing
onto something new that could log the