I was referring to x1e.32xlarge..2x1920GB ephemeral, 25 Gbps Ethernet + 14 Gbps EBS Ethernet. And at least for the application I'm considering, the working set would fit in RAM and you can run the algorithm online. Score!

That's what I mean. You have to get really big to have Big Data. Fine, you can't do PageRank on a petabyte of web crawls using one machine. But the datasets that people use for benchmarking, at least the benchmarks that are made public, you definitely can. You can go far larger than a typical benchmark dataset and still do it on one machine.