Not who you asked, but, it's hard to say without knowing exactly what computation is being done, or how much of the time is spent on IO. If you organize that 25

Not who you asked, but, it's hard to say without knowing exactly what computation is being done, or how much of the time is spent on IO. If you organize that 250GB in ram the right way (cache coherency, right container types), and spend a lot of effort doing analysis of algorithm selection, you might be surprised how much you can get done on a single (large) machine with enough cores.