Abstract: A method, system and computer program product for reducing an amount of epigenetic data representing epigenetic modifications of a genetic sequence of an organism using a Hadoop type distributed file system. The method including the steps of breaking epigenetic data and a reference epigenetic map into blocks of data of a fixed size; distributing the blocks of data to the plurality of worker nodes within the clusters and replicating the blocks of data within each of the worker nodes; tasking the plurality of worker nodes to perform a map job comprising mapping the reference epigenetic map relative to the epigenetic data; and when a worker node has reported a completion of the map job, tasking the worker node with a reduce job based on a specific key to an output of epigenetic surprisal data and associated metadata.