a piece for asian scientist, written while running archanan, arguing that the hard part of supercomputing is not the computing.
picture a researcher with a simulation that works on their laptop and an allocation on a national machine. between those two things sits weeks of work that has nothing to do with their science: mpi topologies, schedulers, queue etiquette, and the near-certainty that the first genuinely large run is also the first time anyone has found out whether the code scales. that run is expensive, and when it fails it usually fails for a reason that has nothing to do with the physics.
the argument in the piece is that this gap is an engineering problem rather than a fact of nature, and that treating it as a rite of passage is how a field ends up accessible only to people who already know the folklore. domain scientists should be able to spend their allocation on science, not on discovering that their halo exchange deadlocks above four thousand ranks.