I wrote last year's benchmark. The clusters are completely different, and so is the workload. Last year's cluster had 300 VMs, which was a much higher price point, and the workload was write only. This benchmark uses YCSB workloads A and B, which we though matches the usage we'll have on BigTable. The cluster is much smaller as well. I shared my scripts from last year, it is pretty easy (although a bit expensive) to repro the numbers. Let me check if we can share this year's benchmark scripts as well.