Capitalism is groovy, but at what cost?

Scalability! But at what COST?

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 ...

Amitriptyline: still efficacious, but at what cost?

Distributed Machine Learning - but at what COST?

Training machine learning models at scale is a popular workload for distributed data flow systems. However, as these systems were originally built to fulfill quite different requirements it remains an open question how effectively they actually perform for ML workloads. In this paper we argue that benchmarking of large scale ML systems should consider state of the art, single machine libraries ...

Energy drinks: Getting wings but at what health cost?

UNLABELLED Energy drink consumption represents a global public health problem, especially among adolescents and young adults. The consumption of energy drinks has seen a substantial increase during the past few decades, especially in the Western and Asian countries. Although manufacturers of energy drinks claim that these beverages are beneficial in that they can boost energy, physical performa...

Another arrow in the quiver--but at what cost?

Gamillscheg et al. report on a single patient who had a large pulmonary arteriovenous malformation with significant right-to-left shunting and a cerebrovascular accident secondary to presumed paradoxic embolism. The accompanying still-frame cineangiogram demonstrates a large arteriovenous malformation with a 10-mm feeding artery and no obvious narrowing, making it difficult to provide endovascu...