Portable Metrics to Guide the Design of High-Performance Computers

The overall performance of a computer system is heavily dependent on the interactions between the hardware, the operating system, and the application code. Typically, the performance of a computer system is measured by the amount of time required to complete the computations in a set of benchmark programs. These time-based measurements provide data on the performance of a particular combination of hardware, operating system, and application code, but these measurements cannot provide accurate predictions for other combinations of hardware and software. This inability to apply the measurements from existing computer systems to accurately estimate the performance of future computer systems hinders the optimization of high-performance computer system designs.