I came across one of the most interesting and humorous research papers while doing my nightly reads. The paper is titled Twelve Ways to Fool the Masses When Giving Performance Results on Parallel Computers by David H. Bailey and published in 1991. You can download the full paper here.
The title describes exactly what the paper is about and I’ll just share some interesting snippets from the document.
To quote in part the abstract:
Many of us in the field of highly parallel scientific computing recognize that it is often quite difficult to match the run time performance of the best conventional supercomputers. But since lay persons usually don’t appreciate these difficulties and therefore don’t understand when we quote mediocre performance results, it is often necessary for us to adopt some advanced techniques in order to deflect attention from possibly unfavorable facts