
I confess, I'm scared of the next generation of supercomputers - occamschainsaw
https://www.techradar.com/news/should-we-fear-the-next-generation-of-supercomputers
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hadsed
There's an important thing missing from the HPC community, and that is a focus
on software usability.

Maybe things have changed since I worked as a scientist in training at a
government lab with one of these crazy machines. But I doubt it.

Trying to use such a computer efficiently was one of the things that took me
to my current career as an engineer (and the scientific background landed me
in ML), and that was a great thing for me. But for a scientist who is focused
on science and not computer architecture, distributed algorithms, programming
quirks of working with accelerators (thank you deep learning, because writing
CUDA code was painful), they are extremely unproductive when they don't get
the help they need.

So I'm fairly skeptical that we're really getting the best return on our
investment with Cray and IBM at the helm of supercomputing.

But I have to confess I don't know what I would do to fix it. One thing comes
to mind: hire a software tools team at these labs to build a nice software
layer to make the rest of the scientific teams more productive. But this is
very much what I would do as a company executive, not director of a government
science lab. I'm not sure what constraints exist on the finance or politics
side. But a change is definitely going to require some leadership.

~~~
skyde
What about language designed for HPC like Chapel and Fortress. Or any nested
data-parallel languages.

All we need is An easy way to do safe stateful parallel algorithm using
Distributed transaction or purely functional data parallelism over any shape
of Data structure ( tree, graph ...)!

