Civilization V came out towards the end of the 2010, but its achievements in this area have yet to be bettered, and it's AnandTech's game of choice for testing a GPU's compute ability.

ENGADGET: Primed: The crazy science of GPU compute Mobile

Since the era of Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, advances in science and mathematics have required data in excess of our ability to compute it readily.

FORBES: Why Big Data Is Getting The Bully Treatment

The operating system needs a new capability, the ability to store huge amounts of data on commodity computers and then bring the compute to the data.

FORBES: Can Hadoop Survive its Weird Beginning?