David B. Held wrote:
You might. But if you're buying 100 hours of time on a supercomputer at $100/hr. (not sure what going rates are), 10% could mean the difference between $10,000 and $9,000. If we're talking $1,000/hr. or many more hours (like a month), then the absolute savings is obviously much greater. If we aren't targeting the high-end computing market, then perhaps this is all irrelevant. But if you want the best mathematicians in the world to take these libraries seriously, then perhaps we do want to target the high-performance computing market.
Dave
In computational physics there is a bit of folklore about the scale of problems people are willing to attempt. The largest problems done take about a month on the best machines available. In that setting, 10% is a big deal and 100% is completely unacceptable. However, if someone is not doing the most complex computational problems there is not nearly as much pressure for performance. At the physics department that I am a part of, much research computation is done on personal computers and in run times of less than an hour. In that setting, if you don't have to do too many runs, 10% is not a big deal. John