What are you on about? The author is counting rows in a database and checks how much time it takes the database to process the query. Counting rows is easily pa

What are you on about? The author is counting rows in a database and checks how much time it takes the database to process the query. Counting rows is easily parallelisable. So are many problems, and we still are at a point where we are creating languages and frameworks that allow us to work with the data at a higher level: e.g. theano, numpy or TensorFlow. Speed of light is only an issue for latency-sensitive operations: e.g. if every sub-operation is non-commutative in a given transaction then it would be expected to be completed before any other sub-operation.