> We offer a new metric for big data platforms, COST, or the Configuration that Outperforms a Single Thread.

> In this paper we take several recent graph processing papers from the systems literature and compare their reported performance against simple, single-threaded implementations on the same datasets using a high-end 2014 laptop. Perhaps surprisingly, many published systems have unbounded COST—i.e., no configuration outperforms the best single-threaded implementation—forall of the problems to which they have been applied.