That's often the ideal case. Individual tasks are small enough to run on commodity hardware but large enough that you don't have an excessive number of them. Th

That's often the ideal case. Individual tasks are small enough to run on commodity hardware but large enough that you don't have an excessive number of them. That means you can write simple software without wasting effort on distributed computing. I've seen similar things at the intersection of bioinformatics and genomics. Computers are getting bigger but the genomes aren't, and tasks that require distributed computing are getting rare.