“The average Physics PhD student gets on average 250 hours of computer instruction during his or her education.”
I presume you are talking about total hours, not semester hours. I only had 7 semester hours (3 classes), or about 280 wall clock hours. Your stat sounds about right. However, prior to 2006, there were no Cell processors for Universities to use, much less teach a class on how to program.
Is programming these machines hard? Yes. I shudder to think about having to program RoadRunner. If I had the hours on RoadRunner, I would take advantage of any books on the Cell architecture, any classes that the staff taught, &c.
Just because a user says a machine is broken does not actually mean that it is broken. The user has to continually Learn how to get the most out of the latest hardware, from papers, books, staff, tools, and anything else they can get their hands on.
