Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!news.funet.fi!funic!santra!santra!apm From: apm@vipunen.hut.fi (Antti Miettinen) Newsgroups: comp.benchmarks Subject: Re: performance vector approaches Message-ID: Date: 28 Apr 91 00:14:54 GMT References: <1991Apr25.174542.100@skyler.mavd.honeywell.com> Sender: news@santra.uucp (Cnews - USENET news system) Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland Lines: 53 In-Reply-To: djbailey@skyler.mavd.honeywell.com's message of 25 Apr 91 23:45:42 GMT In article <1991Apr25.174542.100@skyler.mavd.honeywell.com> djbailey@skyler.mavd.honeywell.com writes: >Someone must have thought of this before. I haven't...so if you have, skip this now and never flame me ;) Really..I'm inserting a page character here which should stop every pager, so skip now.. >Suppose we describe a computer's performance as an n-dimensional >vector. I think this is a great idea. The problem is that everybody would like to get only one number to characterize the performace of a computer. In my opinion the concept of vector representation is ideal for computer performance. Computers are different and perform well in different areas. >What would the dimensions be? Good question ;) >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. And the problem that everybody would only take the absolute value of the performance vector. But vector as performance figure would be quite usefull. Figure this: computer X has a performance vector whose magnituse is HUGE but it is severy bent to the direction of floating point performance. Would be very usefull if we had well established axis base, I think. >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? Think of the Real World (what's that?). What do we want the computers to do? My suggestions for the dimesions: - floating point performance (whetstones?) - integer performance (2.x dhrystones?) - graphics performance (something I don't know too much about) - I/O performance (average seek, kB/sec or something..?) -- Corrections on spelling etc. directly to: apm@kata.hut.fi (I would appreciate any, really)