Is High Performance Computing Harmful?
IT Conversations | Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators | Greg Wilson
A couple of years ago, I met Jon Udell at the University of Mary Washington Faculty Academy after following his columns for a long time in Byte and Infoworld. He’s been an innovator in fields as diverse as groupware, screen casting and community uses of open software. (His documentary screencast on Wikipedia’s heavy metal umlaut page is a classic.)
Among his many current activities, Jon hosts a series of interviews with IT innovators on the T Conversations Network that includes this great discussion of some the problems inherent in providing high performance computing resources.
Greg Wilson recently, a faculty member at the university of Toronto, gave a talk entitled High-Performance Computing Considered Harmful. Wilson explains why HPC can’t be all about speed and power. Instead, we must also care, more than we have in the past, about human productivity, correctness, and reproducibility.
Well worth a listen given the potential contributions of HPC across the curriculum–and the problems investing in initiatives like this presents.
Pablo says:
June 5th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
This conversation was so interesting. Among MANY other things I really appreciated the discussion of reproducibility of science done via code.
Also, it’s near the end of the the discussion and they don’t talk about it for long (it’s more of a mention really), but the concept of science research screencasts is really interesting and seems like it would have incredible impact in pedagogy. See:
http://bioscreencast.com/
Gene says:
June 6th, 2008 at 7:36 am
Pablo,
Thanks for the bioscreencast link. I agree — Screencasts are cheap, easy and effective pedagogies and the idea of creating a common repository and interface as these folks have done is very interesting.