The Emperor Has No Clothes: What HPC Users Need to Say and HPC Vendors Need to Hear

Abstract

A decade ago, high-performance computing (HPC) was about to "come of age" and we were convinced it would have significant impact throughout the computing industry. Instead, the HPC community has remained small and elitist. The rate at which technical applications have been ported to parallel and distributed platforms is distressingly slow, given that the availability of key applications is precisely the mechanism needed to drive the growth of the community. When major software vendors state publicly that their products will never be parallelized - as some have in recent months - it's time for us to take a hard look at reality. Marketing and PR claims to the contrary, HPC is not a success story. Although our capabilities continue to expand, we have not found a way to make HPC improve our productivity.