LLNS may have excluded the wrong people in last VSSOP? The exclusions were based on outdated job categories and related skills. ULM are now thinking that in the future, job categories and functional areas will have to be re-defined. The next VSSOP/ISP will be based on the new categories and functional areas. The questions I have are: 1) Why didnt they think of that before the transition. It seems like their style is “change things as you go”. Planning is out the window! 2) Who will give input on the new changes? The next RIF apparently is going to be more lucrative than the VSSOP. Depending on the length of employment, a RIFed person, not only gets their 1 week pay per year of service but also from 30 to 120 days notice, essentially 30 to 120 days pay. Please feel free to comment on the rumors or add new ones you actually heard.
Comments
Of course, many scientific codes involve computations such as modeling events in several dimensions or in the quantum domain, and suffer from unfavorable scaling in any case, so the algorithm in use may play a greater role in changing the scaling power law or exponent, it may not be that important to lower the prefactor.
Better operating systems, languages, and compilers and scheduling algorithms can help performance though, and this could be part of the answer.
In real code environments, code maintenance and refactoring can also be an issue, code can be bloated or intentionally obfuscated by developers, and of course in high performance computing there can be perverse incentives to utilize more resources rather than less, and so on. Code features also become bloated and obfuscated, as in Microsoft office and Windows, as a way of generating a technological moat, driving ever-greater computing needs for basic tasks.
Maybe AI coding tools will cut this Gordian knot and lead to more efficient and maintainable code, it could also erode some of the power of entrenched platforms and operating systems at the big tech companies, leading to a new wave of innovative and performant software.