the use of qualitative terms such as "embarassingly parallel" often leads to confusion.
Scaling can be measured. It can be quantified. Nothing scales forever, because at some point you want to get an answer back to a person, and/or the components of the app need to talk to each other. It's these basic timing elements that can tell you a lot about scaling. Actually running the app tells you a bit more, of course. Even the really easy apps hit a wall sooner or later. I still remember the struggle I had to scale a simple app to a 16 node cluster in the early days (1992). That was a long time ago and we've gone a lot further than that, but you'd be surprised just how hard it can be, even with "easy" applications. ron
