[otabdeveloper4]

> and you could easily load up an 8yo computer today to its breaking point

I've seen people load up a 200 machine cluster on AWS doing quite mundane tasks.

Information complexity is the only physical quantity that doesn't obey conservation laws, so this kind of thing really isn't impressive or interesting.

[mianos]

In real life, a few years ago, people at work fired up a 20 host cluster on AWS to do something that I later replaced with a script and GNU parallel (at the time a perl script), running on my 2013 Macbook pro i7, beating it by 10X.

Sure, I'll admit it may not be fair to compare, considering the AWS host type, copying the data out and in, and all the other overhead.

That said, the project sure looked like it was resume driven 'big data'.