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From: djbailey@skyler.mavd.honeywell.com
Newsgroups: comp.benchmarks
Subject: performance vector approaches
Message-ID: <1991Apr25.174542.100@skyler.mavd.honeywell.com>
Date: 25 Apr 91 23:45:42 GMT
Lines: 17

Someone must have thought of this before. What are the references for,
problems with, and current state of the art for the following concept?

Suppose we describe a computer's performance as an n-dimensional 
vector. What would the dimensions be? Some possibilities are simple 
computation speed, complex computation speed (floating point and 
special functions), internal information transfer speed, in/out 
information transfer speed, and degree of parallelism in the 
architecture. Each dimension would be measured at a low level and 
scaled to create the vector.

We also want to map applications into this same n-dimentional space so 
that appropriate computer systems can be identified. Perhaps the main 
problem with a performance vector is in figuring out how to map 
recognizable problem attributes into the vector space. Comments?

-- Don J. Bailey