No, the abstractions are not sufficient. We do care about these details, a lot. Of course, not every application is optimized to the hilt. But if you want to s

No, the abstractions are not sufficient. We do care about these details, a lot. Of course, not every application is optimized to the hilt. But if you want to so optimize an application, exactly things you're talking about are what come into play. So yes, I would expect every competent HPC practitioner to have a solid (if not necessarily intimate) grasp of hardware architecture.