This was admittedly a while ago (2012 or so) but when I was in grad school, I would often challenge other people in my Distributed Systems lab to compare their

This was admittedly a while ago (2012 or so) but when I was in grad school, I would often challenge other people in my Distributed Systems lab to compare their Hadoop jobs against just running a batch job on a single system (without the Hadoop overhead etc, just sequential). More often than not, the threshold for "when does this actually make sense" was much larger than they'd expected. And then [1] came out and disappointed some people. By that time I was mostly out of the lab and just doing minor thesis edits, but when I brought it to our weekly reading group the discussion was... animated. [1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos15-paper-mcsherry.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...