Research into distributed parallelism on “the cloud” has
surged lately. As the research agenda and methodology
in this area are being established, we observe a tendency
towards certain common simplifications and shortcuts
employed by researchers, which we provocatively term
“sins”. We believe that these sins, in some cases, are
threats to the scientific integrity and practical applicability
of the research presented. In this paper, we identify
and discuss seven “deadly sins” (many of which we have
ourselves committed!), present evidence illustrating that
they pose real problems, and discuss ways for the community
to avoid them in the future.