Related papers: Myths and Legends in High-Performance Computing

Computational sociology is growing in popularity, yet the analytic tools employed differ widely in power, transparency, and interpretability. In computer science, methods gain popularity after surpassing benchmarks of predictive accuracy,…

Urban legends are a genre of modern folklore, consisting of stories about rare and exceptional events, just plausible enough to be believed, which tend to propagate inexorably across communities. In our view, while urban legends represent a…

Quantum computers offer a new paradigm of computing with the potential to vastly outperform any imagineable classical computer. This has caused a gold rush towards new quantum algorithms and hardware. In light of the growing expectations…

Forecasting technological progress is of great interest to engineers, policy makers, and private investors. Several models have been proposed for predicting technological improvement, but how well do these models perform? An early…

Over the past six decades, the computing systems field has experienced significant transformations, profoundly impacting society with transformational developments, such as the Internet and the commodification of computing. Underpinned by…

Computing systems have undergone several inflexion points - while Moore's law guided the semiconductor industry to cram more and more transistors and logic into the same volume, the limits of instruction-level parallelism (ILP) and the end…

A large spectrum of problems in classical physics and engineering, such as turbulence, is governed by nonlinear differential equations, which typically require high-performance computing to be solved. Over the past decade, however, the…

As an important goal of high-performance computing, the concept of performance portability has been around for many years. As the failure of Moore's Law, it is no longer feasible to improve computer performance by simply increasing the…

There is a common wisdom according to which many technologies can progress according to some exponential law like the empirical Moore's law that was validated for over half a century with the growth of transistors number in chipsets. As a…

Due to common misconceptions about the Church-Turing thesis, it has been widely assumed that the Turing machine provides an upper bound on what is computable. This is not so. The new field of hypercomputation studies models of computation…

With the growing attention and investment in recent AI approaches such as large language models, the narrative that the larger the AI system the more valuable, powerful and interesting it is is increasingly seen as common sense. But what is…

Quantum computing is of high interest because it promises to perform at least some kinds of computations much faster than classical computers. Arute et al. 2019 (informally, "the Google Quantum Team") report the results of experiments that…

In 1991, David Bailey wrote an article describing techniques for overstating the performance of massively parallel computers. Intended as a lighthearted protest against the practice of inflating benchmark results in order to ``fool the…

To model modern large-scale datasets, we need efficient algorithms to infer a set of $P$ unknown model parameters from $N$ noisy measurements. What are fundamental limits on the accuracy of parameter inference, given finite signal-to-noise…

Recently, increased computational power and data availability, as well as algorithmic advances, have led machine learning techniques to impressive results in regression, classification, data-generation and reinforcement learning tasks.…

Quantum computers are believed to surpass the classical ones. Moreover, it is claimed that this belief reaches the level of a mathematically proven fact within the oracle model of computation. Here we impair the whole class of the so-called…

The Web has made it possible to harness human cognition en masse to achieve new capabilities. Some of these successes are well known; for example Wikipedia has become the go-to place for basic information on all things; Duolingo engages…

Studying the reliability of complex systems using machine learning techniques involves facing a series of technical and practical challenges, ranging from the intrinsic nature of the system and data to the difficulties in modeling and…

Hardware, systems and algorithms research communities have historically had different incentive structures and fluctuating motivation to engage with each other explicitly. This historical treatment is odd given that hardware and software…

Innovation in hardware is slowing due to rising costs of chip design and diminishing benefits from Moore's law and Dennard scaling. Software innovation, on the other hand, is flourishing, helped in good measure by a thriving open-source…