Do you have another minute?

By Nan-Chen Chen


In modern society, time is a critical factor in people’s daily lives. People plan their work and tasks based on time, or evaluate their efforts in terms of their personal time input. In research fields that study work, temporality is a topic that has thrived for over a decade. Studies and discussions around temporality consider time organic and socially constructed. For example, an hour spent with family is not perceived as a lost hour if spending time with family is a strong personal value. Another long-debated example is whether the invention of clocks changed the way we experience time, or whether our experience of time naturally led to the invention of clocks. As there are many different perspectives on time and several existing studies that demonstrate the impact of time on interactions and behaviors in work environments, it is important to further understand the role of time in scientific workflows in high performance computing (HPC) systems.

In the fieldwork we conducted in the past months, we uncovered several different types of time, such as human time--when a person waits for a job in a queue to run; or machine time--the time it takes to execute a job or to move data. From our results we have revealed a need to consider the cost and value of different types, scales, and contexts of time. For example, what is the cost and value of the time to run an analysis? The cost could be in terms of allocation spent on computation or I/O, and the value might be the scientific knowledge that is generated from the analysis. A more complex example might be human wait time for a job to run. At first glance, the cost in human time of code running could be pegged to the amount of wait time and clock time, which might be seen as pure inefficiency. But is the cost as high as it appears? Perhaps during this wait time, the scientist has time to reflect upon a previous run, generate the type of creative insight that often occurs during downtime, or accomplish other critical tasks. Thus there may be unexpected hidden value in this “wasted” waiting time.

The examples above demonstrate that time in the context of scientific workflow in HPC systems needs to be approached from diverse perspectives. As more HPC systems and workflow tools are designed to save time, it will be essential to consider human perceptions and judgments rather than just absolute numbers. Maybe in the future when we ask scientists, “Do you have another minute?” they will tell us, “Yes, but it is a more valuable minute than the one that just passed.”