Book excerpt: Biological breakthroughs critical to solving society's most challenging problems require new and innovative tools and a "different way" to analyze the enormous amounts of data being generated. This article for the Breakthroughs magazine focuses on the Data-Intensive Computing for Complex Biological Systems (Biopilot) project--a joint research effort between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. The two national laboratories, both of whom are world leaders in computing and computational sciences, are teaming to support areas of biological research in urgent need of data-intensive computing capabilities.