A system and method for processing unstructured source data is described. Input data having a range of V is loaded from off-chip storage to on-chip storage. The input data is partitioned into P temporary parent partitions via the on-chip storage, where a particular one of the P temporary parent partitions has a range of V/P. The P temporary parent partitions are stored from the on-chip storage to the off-chip storage. The P temporary parent partitions are partitioned for generating P temporary child partitions until the target number of T partitions is generated, where data from of the P temporary parent partitions is source data for recursively loading, partitioning, and storing the source data. An application is configured to access partitioned data from the T partitions for generating an output. The accesses of the partitioned data are sequential read accesses of the off-chip storage.