An Agenda for Improved Evaluation of Supercomputer Performance (1986) / Chapter Skim
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2. Principles for the Evaluation of Supercomputers
2. Principles for the Evaluation of Supercomputers
Pages 13-20
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From page 13... ...
Corollary 3: The value of a computer is time dependent. Different applications having comparable computational complexity perform differently on the same computer, sometimes by an order of magnitude or more, so the validity of an evaluation is limited to the applications studied.
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From page 14... ...
CRITERIA FOR EVALUATION Figure 2-1 shows a relevance tree for some of the criteria that affect the value of a computer. Qualitative and quantitative criteria are distinguished and discussed briefly below to emphasize that evaluation rests on many factors.
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15 EVALUATION CRITERIA 1 ORAL ITATIVE OBSO~SC-NC~ CC~ATIBILI~ ST=D~S QUANTITATIVE ~ - ' 1 P_~e-ORMANCE COST PRODUCTIVE= FIGURE 2-1 A relevance tree for supercomputer evaluation.
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From page 16... ...
Quantitative Criteria Performance Performance evaluation is usually conducted by analyti Cal modeling, simulation, and measurement of the running time of selected codes (commonly called "benchmarking" ~ . Performance criteria for highly complex problems i nclude problem solution time and execution rate; the criterion for large volumes of problems each having low complexity is throughput, that is, the number of problems that can be solved in a given time.
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From page 17... ...
Quality of life includes such things as fast response time in an interactive environment, powerful debugging aids, high-speed and easy to use graphics, powerful languages, and optimizing compilers. MATCHING COMPUTATIONAL AND APPLICATION CHARACTERISTICS The task of evaluation of supercomputers is conceptually one of matching the characteristics of the computational environment with those of the intended applications.
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From page 18... ...
18 Table 2-1 Computing Resources by Technologies and Operating Environments Technologies Operating Environments Centralized Distributed Personal Processing Large-scale Mini Micro and personal computers computers computers Storage Common file Local disk Floppy and hard disks system systems Input-output High-speed Medi~'m-speed Terminals, graphics printers and work stations, and plotters slow printers Communications Site networks, Site networks, Site networks, LAN s a, and WANsb LANs, and WAN s LANs, and WAN s a LAN = Local-area network b WAN = Wide-area network
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The raw data obtained from experiments can be combined to give several metrics of performance. These metrics include time metrics such as problem solution time and interactive response time; rate metrics · ~ ~ · ~ ~ ~ · ~ .
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From page 20... ...
20 r 1 SUPERCOMPUTERS \ / \ · Existing · Proposed . METRICS MODELS · Time | | ~ Empirical | · Rate I | ~ Analytical | ·Cost I l l 1 EXPERIMENTS · Measurements · Simulations FIGURE 2-2 The cycle 0 f perf ormance evaluation .
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