This is where distributed computing comes in. If the mountain won't come to Mohammed then Mohammed must go to the mountain.
One of the examples given for "Big Data" was a smartphone application called SpeedHump. The idea was that the a smart phone has a GPS, clock and accelerometer in in it.
With the app running the phone users would simply go about their daily business and their phone app would record where, when and how severe any shocks (such as driving over a pothole in the road) were.
I can see a time coming where we all have our Smartphones but in the presence of other Smartphones running the same collaborative application they are capable of sharing load with any phone in the same cell. Think SETI@home for the 2010s.
There are obviously technical challenges to be overcome for this to be viable
If the problems are cracked then ever increasing demand for computing power could be met this way.