The vast volume of data produced every day is creating major transformative opportunities in science and industry. The bottleneck limiting progress in science and industrial productivity has now shifted from the generation of massive datasets to their interpretation and exploitation by the sophisticated analytical applications needed to extract actionable knowledge from massive data sets. High‐performance scalable analytics are needed to tame the ever‐growing volume of data and application complexity. The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) launched in 2013 the Scalable Analytics Institute (ScAi) to address the research challenges and opportunities in the new technology area of Big Data. It currently has housed more than 100 Ph.D. students and research scientists.