Social engineering and small words

Social networks and the ‘small word’ network theory show an aggregation pattern based on emergency in many different systems.
In particular, we see how these systems tend to cluster around hubs creating strong and redundant links. This is true inside each ‘small word’ inside a network.
Weak links connect these clusters in more ‘random’ way adding to the system a great speed of navigation: two elements in such a network are linked by a SMALL number of hops (small if compared with the number of nodes and links).
I was wondering if this theory is applied in high performance computing discipline.
PierG