By: Andrew Jones, NAG Group
High Performance Computing (HPC) is a vocal sport.
We are always lobbying for something.
Or giving talks at conferences.
Or writing blogs.
But sometimes we need a bit of help to translate what HPC people say into what they really mean …
What HPC people say |
What they really mean |
It’s all about the science |
I’m going to put up a few science slides first to give me an excuse to talk about our supercomputers for the next hour |
Our nation needs this big supercomputer to compete with other nations |
Our centre needs a big supercomputer to beat our competing centre in our own country |
We must collaborate internationally to get to exascale |
We collaborate internationally because then project partners aren’t competing for the same funding agency |
We need funding for operations not hardware capital |
Don’t you dare reduce my hardware funding, but we do need money for the electricity too |
People are the most important asset in HPC |
I’m sure this is the right thing to say, but I still want money for hardware |
We need to invigorate the HPC supplier ecosystem |
I want more money to spend at my HPC centre |
The national economy will benefit if we drive HPC usage in industry |
I want the government to buy me another supercomputer and fund my business development team |
There is a shortage of HPC talent |
I have no interest in paying the market rate for existing HPC talent or contractors and so I want the government to develop more cheap recruits for me |
Software licences are too expensive |
I want to spend money on hardware |
TOP500 ranking doesn’t matter |
My supercomputer is at the top of the list anyway, so I am free to preach |
TOP500 ranking doesn’t matter |
My supercomputer would not make a high position on the list, so I will ‘diss’ the list |
We need to keep the size of our supercomputer confidential for competitive reasons |
We’ve always kept the size of our supercomputer a secret, but no-one really knows why |
Our new initiative is OpenThing |
‘Thing’ is limited to the technology or partners we choose but we are hoping if we call it ‘Open’ no-one will notice |
We have a much richer user base now than traditionally – data analytics, interactive, python, … |
I prefer the old days when we had users we knew and they were all doing big Fortran+MPI jobs |
We need to collaborate with industry to make this HPC vision succeed |
We got less money from NSF/DOE/Horizon2020 than we were wanted so we are hoping we can shake down industry for the rest |
We have a great sense of self-deprecating humour as a HPC community |
We find this blog post offensive and don’t recognise ourselves at all |