Myths and Legends in High-Performance Computing

Abstract

In this humorous and thought provoking article, we discuss certain myths and legends that are folklore among members of the high-performance computing community. We collected those myths from conversations at conferences and meetings, product advertisements, papers, and other communications such as tweets, blogs, and news articles within (and beyond) our community. We believe they represent the zeitgeist of the current era of massive change, driven by the end of many scaling laws such as Dennard scaling and Moore's law. While some laws end, new directions open up, such as algorithmic scaling or novel architecture research. However, these myths are rarely based on scientific facts but often on some evidence or argumentation. In fact, we believe that this is the very reason for the existence of many myths and why they cannot be answered clearly. While it feels like there should be clear answers for each, some may remain endless philosophical debates such as the question whether Beethoven was better than Mozart. We would like to see our collection of myths as a discussion of possible new directions for research and industry investment.

Myths and legends in high-performance computing

“…To better grasp the divisiveness in our community and to strengthen our anecdotal evidence about these myths, we will conduct large-scale polls within the data center and HPC community over the coming months. Our closing questions from each section will serve as the basis for the polls, and we will summarize the results and update this report (Matsuoka et al, 2023) in due time.…”

Challenges in High-Performance Computing

“…In the subsequent years, quantum computing will not substitute classical computing [Matsuoka et al, 2023]. Instead, Quantum computing will help to solve complex problems that take a lot of time with classical computers.…”