High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Data-intensive computing is a class of parallel computing applications which use a data parallel approach to processing large volumes of data typically terabytes or petabytes in size and typically referred to as Big Data. Computing applications which devote most of their execution time to computational requirements are deemed compute-intensive and typically require small volumes of data, whereas computing applications which require large volumes of data and devote most of their processing time to I/O and manipulation of data are deemed data-intensive.