[frankmcsherry]

> The paper is frankly stupid and a great example of difference between practice and academia. it looks good because they are using a snapshot of Twitter network from 2010.

We used these data and workloads because that was what GraphX used. If you take the graphs any bigger, Spark and GraphX at least couldn't handle it and just failed. They've probably gotten better in the meantime, so take that with a grain of salt.

> Unlike a bunch of out of touch researchers the key concern isn't how "fast" calculations finish, but several others such as ability to reuse, fault tolerance, multi user support etc.

The paper says these exact things. You have to keep reading, and it's hard I know, but for example the last paragraph of section 5 says pretty much exactly this.

And, if you read the paper even more carefully, it is pretty clearly not about whether you should use these systems or not, but how you should not evaluate them (i.e. only on tasks at a scale that a laptop could do better).

[aub3bhat]

"The paper says these exact things. You have to keep reading, and it's hard I know, but for example the last paragraph of section 5 says pretty much exactly this."

Thanks, that addresses my concern. I take back my comment.

But why stop at Rust implementation, there are vendors optimizing it down to FPGA. This sort of comparison is hardly meaningful.

[frankmcsherry]

The only point of the paper is that the previous publications sold their systems primarily on performance, but their performance arguments had gaping holes.

The C# and Rust implementations have the property that they are easy and you don't need to have any specific skills to write a for-loop the way we did (the only "tricks" we used were large pages and unbuffered io in C#, and mmap in Rust).

The point is absolutely not that these are the final (or any) word in these sorts of computations; if you really care about performance, use FPGAs, ASICs, whatever. There will always be someone else doing it better than you, but we thought it would be nice if that person wasn't a CS 101 undergraduate typing in what would literally be the very first thing they thought of.

[nickpsecurity]

It's a great paper. I really enjoyed it. Keep hitting them with reality checks they need! :)