Comment by geocar

Analysis; some model building.

It is popular to buy a bunch of servers (or worse, host them on AWS), a bunch of sysadmins, and so on, so you can support a couple smart analysts with some complex hadoop java streaming somethingrather, but it is much cheaper to just buy them beefy workstations and use awk: A HP Z8 G4 with 1.5TB ram is under £30k, and it's hard to get a sysadmin that has any brains for that, let alone two and servers...