The thrust of the post wasn’t meant to be that it is surprising that you can even do these things on one core; sorry if it came across that way.
Rather, it’s that when doing the work on one core (with a way simple implementation) you go faster than many of the measurements that popular scalable systems put forward as evidence that they improve on the state of the art. Which sort of invalidates that evidence. Some of the papers end up left with fairly scant evidence, which should be a serious issue for researchers.
GraphChi and X-Stream (http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/188535) are much more sophisticated implementations, ones you might not be embarrassed to be beaten by, so they don’t make the same point. And they aren’t any faster than the systems above, and so have the same issues (though perhaps less explaining to do).
Rather, it’s that when doing the work on one core (with a way simple implementation) you go faster than many of the measurements that popular scalable systems put forward as evidence that they improve on the state of the art. Which sort of invalidates that evidence. Some of the papers end up left with fairly scant evidence, which should be a serious issue for researchers.
GraphChi and X-Stream (http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/188535) are much more sophisticated implementations, ones you might not be embarrassed to be beaten by, so they don’t make the same point. And they aren’t any faster than the systems above, and so have the same issues (though perhaps less explaining to do).