No. At least, not in the case of graph computation. This was the conventional wisdom with some people, but circa a year or so ago when we did some measurements,

No. At least, not in the case of graph computation. This was the conventional wisdom with some people, but circa a year or so ago when we did some measurements, no. https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015-07-08.md https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015... https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015-07-31.md https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015... If you don't want to read everything (but you should, before trusting the conclusions), the relevant measurements are here: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015-07-08.md#multiple-computers-1g-vs-10g https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015... Edit: Reading the paper, they cite these measurements and present their work as "only [..] 8.8× slower than a distributed in-memory" system (GraM, a different system than timely dataflow). The quote is on the first page.