Teraflops and other false goals

Abstract

The High-Performance Computing and Communications program has been attacked for having vague and dubious goals. Partly because of this perception, 65 members of the House of Representatives cast votes against extending it. We need concrete measures of HPCC progress without such narrowly defined goals. Measuring performance by high flops rates, speedup, and hardware efficiency can take us further from the solution to scientific problems, not closer. This paradox is especially pronounced for "Grand Challenge" and "teraflops computing". The author considers how we need a practical way to define and communicate ends-based performance of an application, not means-based measures such as teraflops or double precision. Human productivity issues such as development time and cost and the quality of the knowledge we obtain should be the basis of our performance metrics.<>