The GraphChi paper from OSDI 2012 made a similar observation: http://select.cs.cmu.edu/publications/paperdir/osdi2012-kyro... From the abstract: "In this work, we present GraphChi, a disk-based system for computing efficiently on graphs with billions of edges. By using a well-known method to break large graphs into small parts, and a novel parallel sliding windows method, GraphChi is able to execute several advanced…
There is another paper, XStream from SOSP 2013, which ran a facebook sized graph on a single machine. I wonder what is "hot" in this HotOS submission?
For the record, I was pointing out that someone made a similar point as a good thing. I found the authors' post insightful, fun, and a little worrying. As, I think, was intended.