bigtable was written for 1 core machines, with ~ 100 regions per box. Thanks to CMS we generally can't run on < 4 cores, and at this point 16 core machines (with HTT) is becoming pretty standard.
The question is, how do we leverage the ever-increasing sizes of machines and differentiate ourselves from bigtable? What did google do (if anything) to adopt to the 16 core machines? We should be able to do quite a bit on a 20 or 40 node cluster. more thread parallelism?
