[mbreese]

I think it’s a question of cost/benefit.

For the researcher, it can take a lot of extra time and effort (and skill) that they might not have. A unoptimized job that takes four days to run is still faster than taking a week to optimize the code to run in 1 day.

For the researcher, the main limit is time. In many places the cost of the HPC hardware isn’t passed onto them, so their main pressure is time. And running code is generally faster than optimizing code.

(Unless you’re running a week long analysis thousands of times)

Thinking of this as an allocation program for the application to manage is an interesting approach. But the program will need to be able to model their resource requirements from start to end, and know about how long each step will take. This sounds like a variant of the halting problem, but instead of predicting when a program will end, it’s predicting when it will need more resources.