Srinivasan Parthasarathy from Ohio State University gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. “With the increasing popularity of structured data stores, social networks and Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications, complex data formats, such as trees and graphs, are becoming ubiquitous. I will discuss a critical element at the heart of this challenge relates to the sharding, placement, storage and access of such tera- and peta- scale data.”