We welcome the timely Review by Schadt et al . (Computational solutions to large-scale data management and analysis. Nature Rev. Genet. 11 , 647–657 (2010)) 1 , which presents cloud and heterogeneous computing as solutions for tackling large-scale and high-dimensional data sets. These technologies have been around for years, raising the question: why are they not used more often in bioinformatics? The answer is that, apart from introducing complexity, they quickly break down when a large amount of data is communicated between computing nodes.
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Trelles et al. (2011) studied this question.