Advanced data-intensive computing represents an active area of research that spans across a significant number of research topics ranging from traditional parallel and distributed computing to recent Grid and Cloud computing. All these high-performance paradigms share a common emphasis that focuses on the issue of effectively and efficiently representing, managing and distributing large-size and large-scale data that populate their internal layers. This conveys to the well-known term “data-intensive computing”, which represents an emerging challenge in next-generation computing systems.