Famous quotes (as collected by Steve Plimpton)

Most of these quotes have been collected in the Massively Parallel Computing Research Laboratory at Sandia National Laboratories.
  1. What's time to a pig ? -- Carl Diegert
  2. Life isn't mostly symmetric positive definite. -- John Shadid
  3. When we get our new machine we'll be living off the fat of the land. -- Steve Plimpton
  4. Newton's got laws to burn. -- John Shadid
  5. As a professional you know the value of quality support. -- Elan, alleged software company
    That's why they call it research. -- John Shadid
  6. You have to normalize that by everything else that goes on around here. -- unknown Sandian
  7. I hate this machine. I REALLY hate it. -- John Shadid
  8. What day of the week is Thursday ? -- Bill Camp
  9. It's on the top of my list; that's an action item; I'll get right on it. -- Bob Benner, helpful supervisor
  10. Parallel machines are hard to program and we should make them even harder - to keep the riff-raff off them. -- Gary Montry
  11. We must overcome our preoccupation with scientific issues. -- Al Narath
  12. Fundamental science is not where I'd put the incremental dollar. -- Al Narath
  13. Let's blow LANL off the map. -- anonymous Sandian
  14. With the new nCUBE software, you should never have to nboot again. -- Bob Benner
  15. nCUBE - software from hell. -- Mark Sears
  16. You can count on nCUBE to do the intelligent thing. -- Andy Cleary
  17. Great meal guys ! -- Gene Golub to Sandia hosts after $150 dinner
  18. The managers were taken to a rice paddy and unceremoniously shot to death as workers looked on. -- Wall Street Journal
  19. The nCUBE 2 can work in two modes: SIMD and MIMD. -- Doug Harless, nCUBE
  20. Massively parallel machines are generally considered to be hard-to-program special-purpose engines. But the nCUBE is different. -- Doug Harless, nCUBE
  21. We're much too busy to do any real work. -- John Shadid, Ray Tuminaro
  22. Folklore and rumor are inadequate means of spreading information about how to use a computer system. -- John Gustafson, on the nCUBE
  23. Quality is not goodness. -- Sandia National Labs document
  24. There's no point putting whipped cream on manure. -- John Madden
  25. The possibilities are frightening. -- Bob Benner
  26. Conversion of any code to parallel takes a few weeks, perhaps longer. -- Ed Barsis
  27. The Intel Touchstone will be transparent to program. -- Bill Camp
  28. In times of change, the learners inherit the earth - the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to understand a world that no longer exists. -- Eric Hoffer
  29. The most powerful passion in life is not love or hate, but the desire to edit someone else's words. -- sign in Ed Barsis's office
  30. When we move to 980 there will be no network problems. -- Carl Diegert
  31. If you're not making progress, make viewgraphs. -- Juan Meza
  32. The world's an exciting place when you know CFD. -- John Shadid
  33. I wouldn't bet a fortune on nCUBE being the CRAY of the 90's. -- Bill Camp
  34. It's deja-screw all over again. -- Gary Montry
  35. I hope these viewgraphs don't insult your intelligence - they were prepared for management. -- conference speaker
  36. Maybe we'll give the nCUBE-10 to some 3rd world university. -- Bill Camp
  37. The customer is a pinhead. -- Ray Tuminaro
  38. The new CM is a SIMD machine in drag. -- John Shadid
  39. If a machine quacks like SIMD and waddles like SIMD, it's SIMD. -- John Shadid
  40. Weapons lab researchers look at the world of commerce like teenagers anticipating sex - with keen expectation, some trepidation, and no idea of the enganglements and messiness involved. -- The Economist
  41. The weapons labs are not here to understand the world, publish papers, or educate students; they are here to get practical results. -- The Economist
  42. I know how to make 4 horses pull a cart - I don't know how to make 1024 chickens do it. -- Enrico Clementi
  43. There are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. -- Kevin McCurley, paraphrasing a comment by Disraeli (see Mark Twain's autobiography)
  44. It's impossible to do anything in real time. -- Bill Camp
  45. For some people buying a MP machine is like buying a sports car. They want maximum performance, no matter how rough the ride. -- Gary Montry
  46. ES&H is my number one priority ! -- ex-Sandian Venki Narayanamurti
  47. A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a master of pattern. -- G. Hardy
  48. A state-of-the-art calculation requires 100 hours of CPU time on the state-of-the-art computer, independent of the decade. -- Edward Teller
  49. All of science can be divided into physics and stamp-collecting. -- Lord Kelvin
  50. A good scientist is one who knows enough to steal from the best people. -- J. Holton
  51. Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. -- John Von Neumann
  52. Fasten your seat belts. -- Justin Rattner, Intel, on the Paragon
  53. Now we know how important MIMD is. -- TMC corporate line on the CM-5
  54. We're being screwed by people who are better liars than us. -- Bill Camp
  55. Millionaires drive a Mercedes; billionaires drive a pick-up. -- Art Hale
  56. Of course I have my snout in the LDRD trough. How else are we going to support cream-of-the-crop researchers around here ? -- Kevin McCurley
  57. Technical competence is a dime-a-dozen. -- Peter Feibelman
  58. Don't worry about people at Sandia with the wrong attitudes. Those people get old and die. -- Bill Camp
  59. We tend to meet every situation in life by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization. -- Petronius, 100 AD
  60. I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think. -- Pauli
  61. An expert is a person who avoids the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. -- Stolberg
  62. I think I might believe what I just said. -- Bill Camp
  63. Without the vector units, the CM-5 is a well-balanced machine. -- TMC employee
  64. Computer scientists are the historians of computing. -- Gordon Bell
  65. The Intel Paragon - a one-and-a-half dimensional mesh. -- Steve Plimpton
  66. Management took the ball and ran with it before it was fully inflated. The ball that is. -- Bruce Hendrickson, on his research results
  67. God is smooth. -- Bill Camp, discussing PDEs
  68. Don't decide what it's like to be a manager by watching Ernie. -- Sudip Dosanjh
  69. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is. -- a computer scientist
  70. The trouble with the gene pool is that there's no lifeguard. -- Baldwin
  71. We talk to scientists who insist the president-elect should accord science and technology issues top priority. It's like talking to mental patients - you have to look like you take them seriously. -- member of Clinton administration
  72. Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid. -- a John Wayne character
  73. One of the worst sins you can commit around here is to believe your own baloney. -- a Congressman, at the space station hearings
  74. Six Phases of a Project:
    (a) Enthusiasm
    (b) Disillusionment
    (c) Panic
    (d) Search for the guilty
    (e) Punishment of the innocent
    (f) Praise and honor for the non-participants
    -- Karla Jennings
  75. There are 3 rules to follow when parallelizing large codes. Unfortunately, no one knows what these rules are. -- W. Somerset Maugham, Gary Montry
  76. UNIX folks can't market their way out of a paper bag. -- PC Magazine
  77. UNIX is a command-line driven OS that only nerds could love. -- PC Magazine
  78. All you need to be a manager are good English skills and a liking for science fiction. -- Bill Camp
  79. The practical scientist is trying to solve tomorrow's problem on yesterday's computer. Computer scientists often have it the other way around. -- Numerical Recipes, C Edition
  80. If you're not pissing somebody off, you're not doing your job. -- Bill Camp
  81. Every fool can ask a question (about prime numbers), that the wisest man cannot answer. -- G.H. Hardy
  82. Message-passing Fortran is the assembly language of high performance computing. People who program in it once, don't want to do it again. -- Ken Kennedy, Fortran D guru
  83. If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and be implemented, it wasn't worth doing. -- Mollison
  84. People will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time they will pick themselves up and continue on. -- Churchill
  85. Experts and their forecasts:fromThe Experts Speak
    "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." -- Lord Kelvin, 1895
    "There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." -- Albert Einstein, 1932
    "I think there is a world market for about four or five electronic computers." -- Thomas Watson, IBM, 1943
    "There is no reason for an individual to have a computer in their home." -- Ken Olsen, DEC, 1977
    "I think funding for the national labs should increase." -- Bill Clinton at Sandia during the `92 campaign
  86. Most Sandians realized there would be pain and this is compatible with that expectation. -- Pace Vandevender, on the DOE salary freeze
  87. Definition of a paradigm - shift happens. -- Allain Rossman
  88. An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance. -- unknown
  89. PAP = Peak Advertised Performance. SAP = System Advertised Price, as in "Only a sap would pay the SAP for a machine with that PAP." -- Jack Worlton
  90. There are numerous reasons why a global warming CRADA on cow flatulence is appropriate for the tech-transfer funding process. -- Kevin McCurley
  91. The length of a progress report is inversely proportional to the amount of progress. -- unknown
  92. Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they don't manage, and those who manage what they don't understand. -- unknown
  93. Message-passing will become the minority way of doing things. -- Steve Wallach, Convex
  94. If I see Danny Hillis quoted as an expert on MPP one more time, I'm going to puke. -- Larry Ellison, Oracle
  95. The Paragon OSF Unix operating system slays a dragon that has plagued the entire parallel computing industry -- the lack of a fully scalable, industry-standard OS. -- Intel press release
  96. The biggest impediment to making decisions is too much knowledge. -- Bill Camp
  97. Wisdom consists of knowing when to avoid perfection. -- Horowitz
  98. Tie-in is a virtual concept. -- Bill Camp
  99. If you can distinguish between good advice and bad advice, then you don't need advice. -- Van Roy
  100. Fortran is like Latin. There's a lot of it laying around, but it's a dead language. --Dexter Senft, financial guru at Shearson-Lehman
  101. Fortran is the language used for what God intended computers to do. --Alan Laub, professor at UCSB
  102. Never confuse hard work with hard thinking. --Jim Watson
  103. For every vision there is an equal and opposite revision. --Thal
  104. It's impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. --unknown
  105. SUNMOS and C++ are the answer. Now what was the question? --John Shadid
  106. Nothing is impossible for people who don't have to do it themselves. --Weiler
  107. The farther away the future is, the better it looks. --Finnigan
  108. The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing. --Cole
  109. Think of the tremendous human tragedy of time and energy a lot of scientists have lost trying to use MP machines. --Henry Burkhardt, deposed CEO of KSR
  110. We think the gigaflop workstation will have perhaps a 1000 times more impact on society than the teraflop supercomputer. --Ed McCracken, CEO of SGI
  111. I don't understand computers. I don't even understand people who understand computers. --Queen Juliana of the Netherlands
  112. Ethically speaking, no one around here is lily-white. At least none of the managers are. --Ed Barsis
  113. More $ is not the only source of job satisfaction. -- Bruce Hendrickson
    Must be a CS guy. -- Bill Camp
    There's a donor. -- Ed Barsis.
  114. There is no way to educate the rest of Sandia. You can only take over their work. --Kevin McCurley
  115. My feeling is that every town that has cable TV is going to have a supercomputer. We have the chance to be the 1st country that has truly scalable computing that is available to everyone just the way you plug your hairdryer into the wall. --Larry Smarr
  116. Forget UNIX - it will be gone in 5 years. --Tom Jermoluk, president of SGI
  117. C++ is a lot like teenage sex. Everyone's talking about it; no one is doing it. --unknown
  118. The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds a spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure (or becoming a manager). --off the Internet
  119. The only genuinely objective benchmark is the one left on a person's trousers when they sit on a bench that has just been painted. --HPC Wire
  120. I'm undergoing an ethical realignment of my value system. --anonymous commentary on the Gordon Bell process
  121. For a research worker, the unforgotten moments of his life are those rare ones, which come after years of plodding work, when the veil over nature's secret seems suddenly to lift and when what was dark and chaotic appears in a clear and beautiful light and pattern. --Gerty Cori
  122. The Paragon turned my code to roadkill on the information superhighway. --universal sentiment
  123. Hype is the fast lane of the information superhighway. --unknown
  124. The information superhighway?That sounds like a place that's long and boring and kills 50,000 people a year. --Dick Cavett
  125. We're all crash-test dummies on the information superhighway. --unknown
  126. The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided. --Casey Stengel
  127. Computer scientists are smarter than mathematicians. It took computer scientists only 30 years to do what it took mathematicians 300 years to do. Become irrelevant. --David Kuck
  128. Percentage of Canadians who say they approve of the information superhighway:63%
  129. Percentage of Canadians who say they know what the information superhighway is:54% --PC Magazine
  130. There are 2 kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there. --Indira Gandhi
  131. The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwords. --Arthur Koestler
  132. The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact solution of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. --Dirac, 1929
  133. What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork. --Pearl Bailey
  134. Those who agree with us may not be right, but we admire their astuteness. --Cullen Hightower
  135. Instead of putting one man on the moon, we should aim to put every child on the Internet by the age of 10. --Ed McCracken, CEO of SGI
  136. What programs can we eliminate? Maybe the DoE. I don't see any useful purpose it serves. --Bob Dole, Senate majority leader
  137. Heisenberg Certainty Principle for the US Congress: If your position is everywhere, your momentum is zero. --William Lipscomb, Nobel laureate
  138. Virtual reality currently has an extremely high talk-to-work ratio. --1994 National Research Council report
  139. Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards. If you disgrace yourself, you can always write a book. --Ronald Reagan
  140. What is the world's fastest computer and how fast is it ? Currently, it's an HP notebook. It's used on the Space Shuttle to compute orbital position and has been clocked at 17,500 mph. --Robert Hyatt
  141. In the past, it was the science and engineering markets that really pushed us. Now, more often than not, it's the entertainment community, and the scientists and engineers are benefiting from the advances. --Greg Estes, SGI
  142. What's the difference between a computer salesman and a used-car salesman? The used-car salesman knows when he's lying. --Anonymous
  143. After being referred to as the father of the multi-computer, I will be very pleased to contribute to its demise. --Chuck Seitz
  144. Managers used to spend half their time doing research. Now they don't do anything. --Sudip Dosanjh
  145. To do is to be. --Kant
    To be is to do. --Rousseau
    Do be do be do. --Sinatra
  146. It may be possible to wipe out the entire budget on this project without doing any technical work whatsoever. --Bob Benner
  147. The role of the experimentalist is to perform crude analog simulations of theoretical predictions. --Frank Stillinger
  148. If you have a Y-chromosome and a PhD,solicitation to male scientists for the you could be Dr. December. --"Studmuffins of Science" calendar
  149. Enjoy everything in moderation, but don't overdo it. --Anonymous
  150. If DOE becomes part of DOD, then WFO will become WFM -> Work for Mother.
    (Mother = Military Officials That Hire Energy Researchers.Gerry Yonas)
  151. We stand at a crossroads. One path leads to despair, the other to destruction. Let's hope we make the right choice. --Woody Allen
  152. Prostitutes are also customer-focused and market-driven. --Kevin McCurley
  153. Like disco dancing, pet rocks, and mood rings, the Departmentof Energy's time has come and gone. --Rep Todd Tiahrt, House Republican
  154. The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously. --Hubert Humphrey
  155. The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat. --Lily Tomlin
  156. A concensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually. --Abba Eban
  157. Many young people simply do not want to work in the area of nuclear weapons; they prefer to direct their talents to careers in environmental or energy R&D. With a few years experience and a more seasoned perspective, they are often eager to contribute their talents to national security programs. --Al Narath
  158. When you are thinking about something you don't understand you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. The confusion is, because we are all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid trying to figure out how to put two sticks together to reach the banana, and we can't quite make it. So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, I put the two sticks together, and I reach the banana. --Richard Feynman
  159. Sometimes I feel like I'd have a lot more fun if I didn't have a conscience. --Karen Devine
  160. With the crummy raises Sandia's giving, it's getting hard to steal enough office equipment to keep up with inflation. --Carl Diegert
  161. In science it is not enough to think of an important problem on which to work. It is also necessary to know the means which could be used to investigate the problem. --Leo Szilard
  162. Three stages of truth for scientists:
    (1) It's not true.
    (2) If it is true, it's not very important.
    (3) We knew it all along.
    -- Leo Szilard
  163. Imagine having your hand impaled on a sharp hook and then having your entire body lifted up into an atmosphere where you can't breathe! That's fishing. -- spokeswoman for PETA (People for Equal Treatment of Animals)
    Fishing? Sounds like a typical staff meeting around here. -- Anonymous
  164. If time means nothing to you, then surf the Web. -- John Dvorak, PC Week
  165. TV is passive; computers are active. TV is just a really, really good screensaver. -- Bill Machrone, PC Week
  166. The stock market goes nuts over any company that so much as mentions the word "Internet". All this proves to me is that the boneheads on Wall Street are as dumb as they were in college when they had to switch their majors to business to keep from flunking out. -- John Dvorak, PC Week
  167. As for the people who think that Java applets will replace real software, you have to wonder what they're smoking. -- John Dvorak, PC Week
  168. What happens if the mean-time to failure for nodes on the Tflops machine is shorter than the boot time ? -- Courtenay Vaughan
  169. If storms are caused by the flapping of butterfly wings as chaos theory suggests, maybe we can eliminate hurricanes by killing all butterflies. -- Robert Park, What's New
  170. The more I watch television, the more I wonder why I'm not already Supreme ruler of Earth. -- Dogbert
  171. If you've been pounding nails with your forehead for years, it may feel strange the first time someone hands you a hammer. But that doesn't mean that you should strap the hammer to a headband just to give your skull that old familiar jolt. -- Off the Internet
  172. When C++ is your hammer, every problem looks like your thumb. -- Anonymous
  173. Bad Signs at Sandia:

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