Efficiency matters!

Current data intensive scalable computing (DISC) systems, although scalable, achieve embarrassingly low rates of processing per node. We feel that current DISC systems have repeated a mistake of old high-performance systems: focusing on scalability without considering efficiency. This poor efficiency comes with issues in reliability, energy, and cost. As the gap between theoretical performance and what is actually achieved has become glaringly large, we feel there is a pressing need to rethink the design of future data intensive computing and carefully consider the direction of future research.