As an HPC sysadmin working in a university setting, I am all-too familiar with the negative opinions of outspoken graduate students. Often times, new or unfamiliar systems are panned by researchers as poor-performing or “broken” when the problem actually lies with their lack of knowledge on how to properly use the system in question. Parallel code suffers from a terrible lack of portability but this fact does not seem to sink into a certain class of users who assume that their codes should work the same across all systems/compilers/library versions. In my shop, entire platforms have been smeared as “poor performing” simply because our user base did not know how to properly use a complier suite other than GCC. Mere technical understandings may not be worth getting worked up over but, more seriously than that, I’ve seen careers damaged by these misinformed accusations.
Cutting edge systems will tend to suffer from their own novelty: hardware combinations never seen before tend to produce unique hardware problems. However, the tendency of researchers to mistake their own lack of understanding for a broken system should not be underestimated.
