[jcranmer]

To be fair, in the supercomputing community (or, more generally "high performance computing"--HPC), certain acronyms for libraries are very well-known: MPI, HDF5, FFTW, BLAS, MKL--no one is going to bat their eyes at seeing those names without an acronym expansion.

[waynecochran]

Think you could make it one day without using those acronyms?

Use of acronyms is usually an audience dependent thing. I am frequently in the in the audience of talks/papers where I don't know all the acronyms. I think the general rule should be, for writing, if there is a reasonable percentage (say more than 10%) of readers who don't know the acronyms, define it on first use. When speaking, give some context or define the terms early in your talk, to help folks along.

I say in a meeting the other day with marketing folks. They may be the worst offenders. Techies are pretty bad too.

[BenjiWiebe]

And I've only had a passing curiosity of supercomputing, a few years ago, and the only acronym you listed that I have no idea about is HDF5.

[Jarwain]

That's funny. I've never really touched supercomputing & the only one I c recognize is hdf5