With the emerging technologies and all associated devices, it is predicted that massive amount of data will be created in the next few years – in fact, as much as 90% of current data were created in the last couple of years – a trend that will continue for the foreseeable future. Sustainable computing studies the process by which computer engineer scientist designs computers and associated subsystems efficiently and effectively with minimal impact on the environment. However, current intelligent machine-learning systems are performance driven – the focus is on the predictive-classification accuracy, based on known properties learned from the training samples. For instance, most machine-learning-based nonparametric models are known to require high computational cost in order to find the global optima. With the learning task in a large dataset, the number of hidden nodes within the network will therefore increase significantly, which eventually leads to an exponential rise in computational complexity. This paper thus reviews the theoretical and experimental data-modeling literature, in large-scale data-intensive fields, relating to: (1) model efficiency, including computational requirements in learning, and data-intensive areas structure and design, and introduces (2) new algorithmic approaches with the least memory requirements and processing to minimize computational cost, while maintaining-improving its predictive-classification accuracy and stability.