Am I reading it correctly? They want people to optimize their code without directly accessing their hardware. This is not how it should be done. Is it really

Am I reading it correctly? They want people to optimize their code without directly accessing their hardware. This is not how it should be done. Is it really from NASA? Are they lacking HPC programmers? Or any one knows HPC? Either their code is really bad such that optimizing on your home commodity computer is enough to get it run faster, or they are just making fun of it. Even if the code gets much faster with their aging clusters, it wouldn't necessary be any better with skylake or knights landing.