This is true, but at the upper end the "it isn't Big Data if it fits in a single system's memory" rule starts to get fuzzy. If you're using an SGI UV 2000 with

This is true, but at the upper end the "it isn't Big Data if it fits in a single system's memory" rule starts to get fuzzy. If you're using an SGI UV 2000 with 64 TB of memory to do your processing, I'm not going to argue with you about using the words "Big Data". ;-) I figured using an EC2 instance was a decent compromise.