It was probably a reference to this old piece of satire: http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmer

It was probably a reference to this old piece of satire: http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers In this case, there would be lots of programmers in HPC field alone who want the micro and macro benchmarks to be good since they're squeezing every bit of number crunching they can out piles of machines they spent a fortune on. When I studied supercomputing, they were timing everything from latency of memory operations (esp NUMA) to context switches on CPU's to raw MIPS. The suppliers were competing on that stuff, too.