The classic rant on this subject by McSherry, et al. Scalability! But at what COST? https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos15-paper-mcshe

The classic rant on this subject by McSherry, et al. Scalability! But at what COST? https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos15-paper-mcsherry.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos... We offer a new metric for big data platforms, COST, or the Configuration that Outperforms a Single Thread. The COST of a given platform for a given problem is the hardware configuration required before the platform outperforms a competent single-threaded implementation.