[mmt]

> I guess some people are defensive about their high performance computing approaches...

Fortunately, when articles about real HPC clusters (aka Supercomputers) make it to the front page, they need no defense, only an occasional explanation that what makes them (extra) special are the high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects. (Those interconnects make a very strong effort at Fallacies of Distributed Computing numbers 2 and 3[1] and tend to neatly take care of the remaining 6).

To be fair, though, I don't think the claim for the more common distributed systems is that they're "high performance" so much as that they're scalable (and have other benefits of being multi-node like resilience).

[1] The bandwidth may well be indistinguishable from infinite if it exceeds local (e.g. CPU-memory, CPU-CPU, CPU-GPU) bandwidths. I don't think that's yet true for something like multi-socket Intel systems, but it might be possible with enough interface cards. I didn't look at the specs on those POWER9 chips.