"biological data" is a bit vague, but for the data I know to be that big, sequence and array data, it does not naturally have the structure of a dataframe nor is pandas the tool of choice.
Doesn't Pandas target only structured (tabular) in-core datasets? (Unless you use something like Blaze / Dask / Ray on top.)
Does anyone really work with Pandas on "100's of terabytes of biological data"?
pandas.read_hdf has beaten out ray.dataframe.read_csv in terms of speed on the few files I've just initially tested now. But I imagine the programmable flexibility csvs have over hdfs (I've never used a Unix command to edit a hdf for example) is why this new approach could get some traction.