Architecting for Scale (BA ch 3)

Having read the chapter, it almost seemed to me that the author's were really trying to find a sort of "holy grail" of parallel computing. The thought of taking an application that has little or no knowledge of parallelism and being able to deploy it on a magical cluster that handles the concurrency and scheduling issues behind the scenes would be a huge feat. Just think of it ... none of us would even have to learn how to write parallel applications!

I question the application of this architecture for the MMO space as the authors intend. It seems that a major concern with these games is latency. The authors freely acknowledge that this system may be more prone to latency than other solutions in use today, but seem to brush off the importance. Are the authors out of touch with the requirements of their audience? Is the system doomed to fail from the start?

I would have also liked to see more details regarding performance. Yes, I get that there are no readily available benchmark suites that they can run to sort of gauge the performance of this architecture vs. existing architectures. However, I think the authors could have at least provided details regarding transactions per second for varying number of nodes or comparison of tasks per second for a single host cluster vs. 10, 20, 50, 100 ... node systems. Does the system scale linearly with the number of nodes or do additional nodes experience diminishing returns in regards to performance metrics? And is there an upper limit to how big this thing can scale?