Hardware

Depends strongly on the type of data analysis.

My employer does a form of analysis with many different algorithms on numerous subsets, and compare which one does best. It's not always the same one that works best.

This means that for one specific desired result, you need to do dozens of calculations, and they can be done perfectly in parallel. Doing it single-threaded takes days.

We could easily max out a machine like this on our data files for hours or days on end just to go through the permutations, if the data isn't carefully vetted first.