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. COST weighs a system’s scalability against the overheads introduced by the system, and indicates the actual
performance gains of the system, without rewarding systems that bring substantial but parallelizable overheads.
We survey measurements of data-parallel systems recently reported in SOSP and OSDI, and find that many systems have either a surprisingly large COST, often hundreds of cores, or simply underperform one thread for all of their reported configurations.
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BibTeX
@inproceedings {189908,
author = {Frank McSherry and Michael Isard and Derek G. Murray},
title = {Scalability! But at what {COST}?},
booktitle = {15th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS XV)},
year = {2015},
address = {Kartause Ittingen, Switzerland},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotos15/workshop-program/presentation/mcsherry},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = may
}
