HPC

So you want to do empirical computer science? Doing good science is difficult. It requires discipline and attention to detail. However there are strategies that can help you focus on answering the questions you can attempt to answer. First you should ask, “is this a scientific question?” Not all questions are scientific questions. Questions about aesthetics, values, ethics are not science questions. “Is A better than B?” is not a scientific question, it’s a question of values....

There’s at least for me an inherent coolness to be able to say that I can run code on a super computer. However, there is often a gap between the kind of programming that you learned in your introductory classes, and what kind of code runs well on a computing cluster. In this post, I try to provide an introduction to high performance computing, and some of the differences between it and personal computing....