[D-Machine]

"I have direct experience of universities doing horrifyingly wasteful computations" is not the ringing endorsement for Matlab you might think it to be...

Granted, I've seen Python horrors on university HPC clusters too, but at least there are libraries and clear documentation (e.g. Lightning, Ray, etc) for how to properly manage these things. Good luck finding that with Matlab.

[esalman]

Universities are not wasteful. University graduates earn more and face fewer unemployment than high school graduates. More universities correlates with higher GDP per capita.

[IAmBroom]

GP said "universities doing horrifyingly wasteful computations".

You claimed they asserted that "Universities are wasteful".

Put the goalposts back where they were.

[esalman]

To find the goalpost look at the parent comment of the one you first saw.

[D-Machine]

Sorry if I was unclear, but GP is correct, you are misreading quite deeply.

I am saying that because it is much harder to find good documentation on using MATLAB on HPCs, a lot of computations on HPCs that use MATLAB are highly wasteful compared to if they had been written using a language and/or tools that make it much easier to use HPC resources more efficiently. I was NOT in any way saying that "universities are wasteful".

[esalman]

Fair. My point though is that in scientific research, accuracy of the results come first. It does not mean anything that research was performed efficiently if the results are incorrect.

[D-Machine]

I dunno, since research has to be funded, and typically HPC clusters also have to allocate compute resources, the clunkiness of things like MATLAB actually does translate to wasted and inefficient funding.

All other things being equal, suppose two research programs are proposing to study roughly the same thing (say, some novel optimization or basic stuff on something like simple neural networks; and let's pretend this is some years ago when people still actually reached for MATLAB neural net tools). If both request significant compute allocations, and I see one is planning on MATLAB, and the other on PyTorch Lightning, I know for sure I would want to give the MATLAB users far less funding, or even none at all, since they're really going to struggle to properly leverage the CPUs and GPUs available to them, whereas the Lightning people will largely just have this work immediately, and almost certainly be able to iterate faster and be more likely to find something meaningful.

It's a contrived and unfair example, and in practice the real problem is actually the annoying MATLAB licensing mostly, but also it really is a fact that MATLAB screws up even basic stuff in HPC environments (see e.g. https://docs.alliancecan.ca/wiki/MATLAB#Simultaneous_paralle...).