Another usually misunderstood fact is that if you are trying to go fast enough, i.e at the limit of a machine then even one machine is a distributed system. Whi

Another usually misunderstood fact is that if you are trying to go fast enough, i.e at the limit of a machine then even one machine is a distributed system. While cache coherency and a bunch of things try to pretend it isn't you really do need to be aware of NUMA and PCI-E lane configuration if you want to get everything out of a box. The very same techniques that make networked distributed systems work well are also useful on threaded or multi-process single image workloads. Sure it doesn't matter at less than ~5gbit line rate but past that point it certainly does.